For the record, 2009 can suck it. While I don't think this past year could be listed as the worst year, it's certainly not ever going to be listed in the same zip code as some of the best. I've lost friends and family this year. People I know have also had their share of loss and setbacks. When I think about it this past year has been more about things happening around me rather than things happening to me. Considering 2009 felt like it was full of death and sadness, maybe it's not exactly a bad thing. Still, there was an undeniable sense of being idle for way too long. It wasn't until very near the end that things actually started to pick up a little bit for me. I feel like I'm standing in the eye of the tornado. For me it's very calm, but around me there is a whirling mass of destruction.
Ten years ago I was leaving this place and heading off to start a new adventure in a brand new state. I was young and eager to try something different. College had only finished the year before and it was time to leave for a new world beyond what I had known while I was in school. I often wonder what my life would have been like had I not taken that leap. A huge portion of my life would be drastically different. I don't regret doing it, but it's natural to think about the road not taken. That was then and this is now and to be honest it's really hard to tell the difference between my then self and now self. Back then I felt as though I was starting over and here I am feeling that same way. I've circled back around to where it feels like I'm starting over again. Maybe it's a good thing for me, but it's also more than a little frustrating because I have a tendency to pre-worry (a term coined by a friend of mine) about things long before I need to. So in addition to feeling like I'm living through the Pink Floyd lyrics "Ten years have got behind you. No one told you when to run. You missed the starting gun", I'm worried that if I'm not careful I'll be right back here in another ten years.
Now all of 2009 wasn't bad. There were actually a lot of good things. Several family members have started new aspects of their lives, be it retiring from a job after years of service or leaving the military to try and sort out what it's like to be a civilian again. And my best friend lost her job after more than a dozen years at the same company only to find an even better job a few months later. Some relationships ended while others started and some even made the leap to that next step. I took the safe route of staying single, although I'm starting to wonder how much of that is by choice and how much is just a bad habit of not trying.
As usual there seemed to be a lot of celebrity deaths. Several of which were surprising at the time. Others may have not been shocking, but were still sad. This year we lost a dirty dancing roadhouse bouncer, one of Charlie's Angels, a prisoner, a man who told us the rest of the story, the king of pop, Khan himself, and the one who said that's the way it is. And to add to all that we lost another Karl with a K when we live in a world where it seems like there are simply too few. It seems like a lot and it probably is, but it's probably not all that different from years before as far as numbers are concerned.
The thing that's strange to me is that we're about to enter 2010, the year we make contact, and yet it feels like we're still arguing over the same old issues for the sake of arguing. Social and scientific issues are still being debated to the point that nothing gets done and the conspiracy theorist in me wonders if that's not exactly how someone wants it. In some ways I wonder if we're not going backwards in some aspects. People are fighting battles that were "won" more than 30 years ago. And some people are fighting battles that should have ended 30 years ago. Having had my fair share of arguments and all out fights about things, I've learned that sometimes it's no good to win the battle if you lose the war. It seems it many cases there are those who would simply rather fight because they see any kind of compromise as a lose-lose situation. Or at the very least they had to give up something. There was a social experiment where a person is given $100 and are told to share a portion of the money with a second person. They can offer any amount, but if the other person refuses they both get nothing. Depending on your logic you may say that the most likely acceptance would be a 50-50 split of the money. Others might think that the second person should be happy with any portion of money because no matter what percentage they get it will still be 100% more than they had. More often than not the people making the laws are willing to walk away with nothing if they can't keep all $100. There's a reason why the acronym for mutually assured destruction is MAD.
Overall 2009 felt like a year that you just had to survive. Anything beyond that was just a bonus. I'd like to be hopeful for 2010, even if it's only because the year itself sounds much better than any of the 00s, which no one found a good name for in ten years. Do I think things will be drastically different than the last year? Maybe not, but I'm still looking forward to what it has to offer.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Words Fail Me
I need a word that describes the feeling you get when you watch a movie or TV show with someone you consider to funny that's so painfully unfunny you seriously question the reason why you ever laughed at anything they've ever done.
Monday, December 14, 2009
On Time
I'm starting to think that I'm operating outside of time. I seriously no longer have any concept of time. Days of the week mean next to nothing to me, which tends to be a problem when I try to go somewhere only to realize that it's actually Saturday and everyone else is out and about too. For over two years I had nothing that even came close to resembling a schedule. I woke up when I was no longer tired and there were several times where I found myself awake for 24-48 hours in a stretch. The whole thing has left my internal clock flashing 12:00 over and over again. And to make things even more confusing I've started a job where my schedule feels like the opposite of everyone else. I'm going into the office hours before the sun will rise. It's before the rooster would think about waking up. Add to that working those same hours on weekends means that Friday is my Monday. So I typically have no idea when I am.
It seems that a lot of people are just killing time. The problem with that is they're killing time while looking forward to nothing. Sure they may be waiting for the weekend, but how different are the weekends from the weekdays? When you're waiting for a movie to start or sitting in a doctor's waiting room you're looking for ways to kill time because something is about to happen, you just have excess time on your hands. If you're killing time every day then maybe it's a sign that you need something to do. What's the point of always watching the clock while you're at work just so you can go home and watch the clock until it's time to go to bed so you can do it all over again?
Which makes me wonder if time isn't running in a line at all. What if it's all sort of circling back on itself over and over again? I mean if we can remember the past then how come we can't remember the future? If you believe in the idea that all time is always happening then it would stand to reason that events that haven't happened in our perception should be remembered as well as those that have already happened. Is that what Deja vu is? Just a brief glimpse into something that's already happened and we're remembering it somehow? If time is always happening then it would be nice if we could get some insight to things up the road so we can make some changes. Kind of like holding your finger on a page while reading one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books. You choose to go right. You were eaten by a bear. With that knowledge you flip back and decide to go left instead.
I guess the trick to time is not thinking of it as something that you need to kill in order to get to the next thing. They say time flies when you're having fun and that's because you're not thinking about how much time is going by, but instead of thinking about the fun itself. So the moment you start seeing time as something that has to be counted you've already partially defeated the purpose.
Often I've wondered how people spend their time. When I was younger I thought for sure I'd be given some kind of knowledge of what to do with myself when I was older. Apparently I never got that memo. So I'm always asking people what they do with their time. Turns out my time spent isn't all that much different from most people. Even when someone has kids there's just a lot of almost empty calories as far as time spent is concerned. Watching television. Surfing the internet. Playing games. Reading books. Chores. Other various hobbies. I'm not saying any of those things are necessarily bad, but all can be treated as things done just to get through a few hours before something else happens.
We've created all these gadgets to save time. All these processes to be more efficient. We've done all this and yet we're still always busy and it feels like there's less time than before. So is there really less time or are we just terrible in how we spend it? It makes me wonder what we'd do with ourselves if we didn't have to do certain things. If we didn't have to eat what would we do with the time we'd save by not having to gather food or money to buy food? No matter how advanced we think we are, there are always going to be the basics of survival that take up a majority of our time. We'd like to believe that we're above the lion, who spends its days looking to eat. We're not that far ahead of them when instead of hiding in the grass waiting for a slow gazelle we're stalking through some office waiting for our paycheck so we can buy a steak.
Maybe some day we will evolve beyond what we are now and we'll look back at all of this with different eyes. It makes me think of the closing lyrics for an old song.
"Now it's been ten thousand years, man has cried a billion tears for what he never knew. Now man's reign is through, but through eternal night, the twinkling of starlight. So very far away. Maybe it's only yesterday"
It seems that a lot of people are just killing time. The problem with that is they're killing time while looking forward to nothing. Sure they may be waiting for the weekend, but how different are the weekends from the weekdays? When you're waiting for a movie to start or sitting in a doctor's waiting room you're looking for ways to kill time because something is about to happen, you just have excess time on your hands. If you're killing time every day then maybe it's a sign that you need something to do. What's the point of always watching the clock while you're at work just so you can go home and watch the clock until it's time to go to bed so you can do it all over again?
Which makes me wonder if time isn't running in a line at all. What if it's all sort of circling back on itself over and over again? I mean if we can remember the past then how come we can't remember the future? If you believe in the idea that all time is always happening then it would stand to reason that events that haven't happened in our perception should be remembered as well as those that have already happened. Is that what Deja vu is? Just a brief glimpse into something that's already happened and we're remembering it somehow? If time is always happening then it would be nice if we could get some insight to things up the road so we can make some changes. Kind of like holding your finger on a page while reading one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books. You choose to go right. You were eaten by a bear. With that knowledge you flip back and decide to go left instead.
I guess the trick to time is not thinking of it as something that you need to kill in order to get to the next thing. They say time flies when you're having fun and that's because you're not thinking about how much time is going by, but instead of thinking about the fun itself. So the moment you start seeing time as something that has to be counted you've already partially defeated the purpose.
Often I've wondered how people spend their time. When I was younger I thought for sure I'd be given some kind of knowledge of what to do with myself when I was older. Apparently I never got that memo. So I'm always asking people what they do with their time. Turns out my time spent isn't all that much different from most people. Even when someone has kids there's just a lot of almost empty calories as far as time spent is concerned. Watching television. Surfing the internet. Playing games. Reading books. Chores. Other various hobbies. I'm not saying any of those things are necessarily bad, but all can be treated as things done just to get through a few hours before something else happens.
We've created all these gadgets to save time. All these processes to be more efficient. We've done all this and yet we're still always busy and it feels like there's less time than before. So is there really less time or are we just terrible in how we spend it? It makes me wonder what we'd do with ourselves if we didn't have to do certain things. If we didn't have to eat what would we do with the time we'd save by not having to gather food or money to buy food? No matter how advanced we think we are, there are always going to be the basics of survival that take up a majority of our time. We'd like to believe that we're above the lion, who spends its days looking to eat. We're not that far ahead of them when instead of hiding in the grass waiting for a slow gazelle we're stalking through some office waiting for our paycheck so we can buy a steak.
Maybe some day we will evolve beyond what we are now and we'll look back at all of this with different eyes. It makes me think of the closing lyrics for an old song.
"Now it's been ten thousand years, man has cried a billion tears for what he never knew. Now man's reign is through, but through eternal night, the twinkling of starlight. So very far away. Maybe it's only yesterday"
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
On The Apocalypse
Well I suppose it has to happen at some point. The end of the world as we know it. No not the end of the world because in most cases Earth will continue to be here long after we're gone. It bothers me when people say the end of the world because short of our planet being totally vaporized into space dust, it's going to keep spinning around the Sun whether it can support life or not. There is the the chance in about 12 billion years that humans are still on the planet when the Sun finally runs out of hydrogen to fuse and then goes through helium fusion and becomes a Red Giant, where it expands out to the orbit of Mars. Even then it would take awhile before Earth felt some lasting effects. Long story short it would take so many billions of years for that to happen that man as we know it will have become something quite different than what we are now.
Anyway pick your ending. Zombie invasion, hit by an asteroid (or meteor), global climate meltdown, or good old fashion nuclear winter. According to most science fiction there are really two ways things can go in the future. Either there will be an apocalypse and the world will be turned into burnt out shell where people fight to survive and it's questioned if mankind will burn out as well. The other option is that civilization turns into some kind of utopia. The caveat with option two is that often times you have to go through option one to get to the society of bliss.
In most of the disaster movies there are only about twenty minutes worth of signs that something is wrong. And the only ones to notice it are the quirky scientist guys that are amazingly smart, but somehow aren't reputable enough for anyone to take their work seriously until the core of the Earth has stopped spinning or The White House is covered in an ice storm that won't end for two years. The more likely scenario is that the events that are leading to the end of the world (as we know it) have already been set in motion. It's not going to be everything fine one day and the next we're in a panic because the sky is raining fire. Even when the dead rise from their graves there's always going to be a couple days of reports that corpses are running amok. So try to watch the news at least once a week to get a heads up on those sort of things.
The part that interests me is how people will react in the face of such an event. Some will be in denial that anything could be happening. The scope of the event will be just too large for their brains to handle. And it's hard to blame them because of the constant barrage of things we're told we should be afraid of. While I don't believe H1N1 is going to be a pandemic that will wipe out humanity, I do wonder if people think H3N3 could be. Beware of Captain Trips. Then you have the other group of people. These are the ones who see what's happening and just deal with it. Maybe they stock up on canned food and shotguns (which is probably a good idea anyway). Maybe they're just quick enough to avoid the initial wave of undead and get setup on a nice fortified island of safety. These people will do whatever is necessary to survive.
The really depressing part about surviving the apocalypse is that's all you're doing. You're just surviving. In most of the stories about the end of the world the people in it are just trying to make it to tomorrow. There aren't a lot of spare moments spent on hopes and dreams. Maybe that's how things were a few thousand years ago. Less time was spent on worrying about your feelings or if your company will sell another dozen widgets and more time was spent on finding a clean water source or where your next meal will come from. I'm not saying that things were better back then, but it was a much simpler definition of wants versus needs.
Maybe all the survivors are doing is surviving because they know how far things have been set backwards. If you think about it, this is the most advanced our society has ever been, to our knowledge anyway. That means we have so much farther to fall should some catastrophic event happen. If something were to kill all electronic devices in 1879 the biggest hit would be the first commercial power station in San Francisco. At least as far as regular people could tell. For the most part it wouldn't be a lasting setback to the future of man. You kill power today and the effects are instantaneous. Our reliance on electronics makes us even more susceptible to drastic reversals in progress as a society. Imagine what life would be like if an EMP hit most of America. Even if we were capable of replacing the electronics that were destroyed, the time that we're down could lead to chaos. If it happened in the summer you'd lose people in the south. If it happened in the winter you'd lose people in the north. A week without lights, or phones, or the blessed Internet and society as we know it could start to crumble around the edges. The longer we spend in the dark, the more feral we become.
And that's just an electromagnetic pulse. Imagine if at the start of the industrial revolution there was a cataclysmic event that set everything back 200 years. Would things progress the same way that they were going in the first place? I know life finds a way to survive, but how does it find its way to progress beyond just survival? What happens to a society that is forced to go backwards and start over? Do we learn from the mistakes we made? Maybe there will be those who look at technology as the root of the problem and prefer we go back to a more nomadic existence. Maybe we rebuild and in time we get back to where we are now. New York City is built on the remains of the old city. So it is possible.
There are so many things that could finish us off that if you thought about it for too long you might go a little crazy. People like to think we have the means to change the world, but really we just have the means to change things enough that we can't live on the planet anymore. So we can create our own apocalypse either with weapons of mass destruction or through the inadvertent creation of some super virus. Personally I think the Large Hadron Collider has some potential to warp all matter as we know it. The Earth itself could have some global problem be it climate changes or killer trees. And if that's not enough you have other outside forces (think meteor, not aliens). I guess it just comes down to enjoying what you have while you have it because we could be already on our way to the end of things and just not know it yet.
Anyway pick your ending. Zombie invasion, hit by an asteroid (or meteor), global climate meltdown, or good old fashion nuclear winter. According to most science fiction there are really two ways things can go in the future. Either there will be an apocalypse and the world will be turned into burnt out shell where people fight to survive and it's questioned if mankind will burn out as well. The other option is that civilization turns into some kind of utopia. The caveat with option two is that often times you have to go through option one to get to the society of bliss.
In most of the disaster movies there are only about twenty minutes worth of signs that something is wrong. And the only ones to notice it are the quirky scientist guys that are amazingly smart, but somehow aren't reputable enough for anyone to take their work seriously until the core of the Earth has stopped spinning or The White House is covered in an ice storm that won't end for two years. The more likely scenario is that the events that are leading to the end of the world (as we know it) have already been set in motion. It's not going to be everything fine one day and the next we're in a panic because the sky is raining fire. Even when the dead rise from their graves there's always going to be a couple days of reports that corpses are running amok. So try to watch the news at least once a week to get a heads up on those sort of things.
The part that interests me is how people will react in the face of such an event. Some will be in denial that anything could be happening. The scope of the event will be just too large for their brains to handle. And it's hard to blame them because of the constant barrage of things we're told we should be afraid of. While I don't believe H1N1 is going to be a pandemic that will wipe out humanity, I do wonder if people think H3N3 could be. Beware of Captain Trips. Then you have the other group of people. These are the ones who see what's happening and just deal with it. Maybe they stock up on canned food and shotguns (which is probably a good idea anyway). Maybe they're just quick enough to avoid the initial wave of undead and get setup on a nice fortified island of safety. These people will do whatever is necessary to survive.
The really depressing part about surviving the apocalypse is that's all you're doing. You're just surviving. In most of the stories about the end of the world the people in it are just trying to make it to tomorrow. There aren't a lot of spare moments spent on hopes and dreams. Maybe that's how things were a few thousand years ago. Less time was spent on worrying about your feelings or if your company will sell another dozen widgets and more time was spent on finding a clean water source or where your next meal will come from. I'm not saying that things were better back then, but it was a much simpler definition of wants versus needs.
Maybe all the survivors are doing is surviving because they know how far things have been set backwards. If you think about it, this is the most advanced our society has ever been, to our knowledge anyway. That means we have so much farther to fall should some catastrophic event happen. If something were to kill all electronic devices in 1879 the biggest hit would be the first commercial power station in San Francisco. At least as far as regular people could tell. For the most part it wouldn't be a lasting setback to the future of man. You kill power today and the effects are instantaneous. Our reliance on electronics makes us even more susceptible to drastic reversals in progress as a society. Imagine what life would be like if an EMP hit most of America. Even if we were capable of replacing the electronics that were destroyed, the time that we're down could lead to chaos. If it happened in the summer you'd lose people in the south. If it happened in the winter you'd lose people in the north. A week without lights, or phones, or the blessed Internet and society as we know it could start to crumble around the edges. The longer we spend in the dark, the more feral we become.
And that's just an electromagnetic pulse. Imagine if at the start of the industrial revolution there was a cataclysmic event that set everything back 200 years. Would things progress the same way that they were going in the first place? I know life finds a way to survive, but how does it find its way to progress beyond just survival? What happens to a society that is forced to go backwards and start over? Do we learn from the mistakes we made? Maybe there will be those who look at technology as the root of the problem and prefer we go back to a more nomadic existence. Maybe we rebuild and in time we get back to where we are now. New York City is built on the remains of the old city. So it is possible.
There are so many things that could finish us off that if you thought about it for too long you might go a little crazy. People like to think we have the means to change the world, but really we just have the means to change things enough that we can't live on the planet anymore. So we can create our own apocalypse either with weapons of mass destruction or through the inadvertent creation of some super virus. Personally I think the Large Hadron Collider has some potential to warp all matter as we know it. The Earth itself could have some global problem be it climate changes or killer trees. And if that's not enough you have other outside forces (think meteor, not aliens). I guess it just comes down to enjoying what you have while you have it because we could be already on our way to the end of things and just not know it yet.
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