gwax's rumblings

I love spring and almost every­thing that it has to offer, but there is one thing about spring that I sim­ply abhor: mos­qui­tos. There was once a time when the lit­tle bug­gers didn’t bother me, though I don’t know if that was truly the case or is sim­ply the way that I remem­ber it. Life is a funny thing when you think about all the things that you have done and that at one time it was the present. No, life’s not funny, time is. I was orig­i­nally going to write about the sea­sons and mos­qui­tos but I think that I’d rather wax philo­soph­i­cal about time, so I’m going to.

About the only thing that any of us can say about time is that it passes. Though that’s really all we can say, we don’t need to say it in so few words. The present is some­thing that is ever present but can never be caught. The moment you think that you’ve laid hold of the present, it’s already the past. We know that there once was a present, but that’s only through mem­ory and if you really try to delve down in your own head some­times you can almost relive mem­o­ries as though they were just hap­pen­ing. The prob­lem is that the almost bit is the key bit; mem­ory is like an ana­log record­ing – tech­ni­cally is one – and every copy is worse than the last. That is all that mem­o­ries are, an imper­fect copy of what was once the present. The dual­ity of the present, in that it never is but always has been and in that it always is and always shall be, is an odd dual­ity, but if one con­sid­ers how many odd dual­i­ties there are in all of real­ity (I wanted to use the words nature, life, the uni­verse, exis­tence and a few oth­ers here, but real­is­ti­cally have to choose one so I went with being but then real­ized that real­ity was a bet­ter one and changed it after I fin­ished this par­en­thet­i­cal expla­na­tion [I also changed the tense of the sec­ond word of the greater par­en­thet­i­cal from want to wanted because that tense seemed more appro­pri­ate once I had fin­ished]). I appol­o­gize if you found the par­en­thet­i­cal of the pre­vi­ous sen­tence to be cum­ber­some, but, when I get myself think­ing about time, I can get recur­sive like that. In the case of most dual­i­ties it is pos­si­ble to see things from either one of the two sides but rarely to see both sides at the same time (ex. those opti­cal illu­sions that have an old woman and a young woman, IHTFP [MIT stu­dents and alum will under­stand], the radi­a­tion of our sun, etc.). All of my life I have seen time from the side that says that the present has always passed and is in mem­ory; I won­der if it is pos­si­ble to see time from the other side of the duality.

There is a part of me that would like to know what it is to see the present as some­thing that always is, if it was even for just a brief moment. There is another part of me, a stonger part of me, that wor­ries that if I ever expe­ri­enced such a moment it would be so spec­tac­u­lar that I would spend the rest of my life seek­ing to relive it. That last sen­tence made me won­der some­thing per­haps a lit­tle more fright­en­ing, if one man­aged to see the present as some­thing that always is, it might not be pos­si­ble to return to see­ing the present as some­thing that’s always passed or it might be too glo­ri­ous to ever return. Of course, it’s prob­a­bly bet­ter not to be fright­ened by the idea, but it’s prob­a­bly good not to search for it either.

So, in short, time’s funny and I have a real dis­tate for mosquitos.

I went back and looked over some of my blog entries and I couldn’t help but think that I’m rather imper­sonal in all of them. This got me to think­ing about this whole blog thing and I don’t really know which way I want to take things.

There have been a few entries in which I related things that weren’t wholely imper­sonal and I remem­ber feel­ing a lit­tle appre­hen­sive after hav­ing posted them. My appre­hen­sion must stem from the same damned place that my aver­sion to say­ing any­thing about how I feel to any­one. I know that some part of it is a fierce desire to do absolutely every­thing on my own, which is, itself, a com­bi­na­tion of a desire for inde­pen­dance and not want­ing to impose on any­one else.

Methinks, from a cathar­tic and self-improving stand­point, that my desire not to con­tinue and pub­lish this entry is pretty indica­tive of why I really should fin­ish it. Perhaps I should use that as my sort of divin­ing rod of blog; the less I want to say some­thing the bet­ter it is that I say it. Funny con­cept, that would be, lis­ten to your­self and then do the oppo­site of what­ever you decide. Funny, yet some­how log­i­cal when you know that your par­tic­u­lar deci­sions on a mat­ter are almost invari­able the wrong ones.

Funny that all this should be sparked by see­ing some­body else com­plain­ing about being lonely on their blog. Just got me think­ing, what’s the point in keep­ing a per­sonal jour­nal if I’m not going to say any­thing per­sonal; it’s not like the events of my life are inter­est­ing enough, on their own, to jus­tify peo­ple read­ing about them.

I feel like wast­ing time with point­less ban­ter and, since this is my blog, I have every right to do so. Whether or not you want to read this is up to you and doesn’t mat­ter. Now that the dis­clam­a­tory bit is out of the way, on to the banter.

You might be won­der­ing why I chose the word ban­ter to describe this writ­ing (or you might not care) and I’ll tell you. I chose the word ban­ter is because I am just going to play with words and thoughts; this is because I haven’t got any­thing use­ful to say. This is going to be one of those “How ’bout that local sports team?” or talk­ing about the weather kind of entries. For that mat­ter, let’s start with the weather.

I stepped out­side ear­lier this evening to make a phone call (the cell recep­tion in my room is hideous) and I noticed that it’s a beau­ti­ful evening out. The truth of the mat­ter is that I stepped out­side a few times because I was play­ing phone tag with some­one. Anyway, it’s a lit­tle on the cool side, but quite far from cold and the sky is very clear. So I was look­ing at the stars a lit­tle, it was quite pleasant.

DIFFERENT TOPIC: Yeah, that needed to be bold. Anyway, I was reminded by the last sen­tance of my pre­vi­ous para­graph (ooh, I’m get­ting all meta and stuff) of how much I like the word pleas­ant. Just so that we’re clear:

From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:

  Pleasant \Pleas"ant\, a. [F. plaisant. See {Please}.]
     1. Pleasing; grateful to the mind or to the senses;
        agreeable; as, a pleasant journey; pleasant weather.

     2. Cheerful; enlivening; gay; sprightly; humorous; sportive;
        as, pleasant company; a pleasant fellow.

Yeah, I’m talk­ing about def­i­n­i­tion 1. It’s such a great word, pleas­ant in and of itself (self-referential now, how do you like that?). Oh and it turns out that grate­ful can be used as an adjec­tive in a man­ner syn­ony­mous with pleas­ant (athena%dict grate­ful says so). So yeah, pleas­ant is a good word, I like it.

One might point and say that my fond­ness for the word pleas­ant is tran­sient and will pass soon; his­tory will likely show that to be an accu­rate predici­tion. My fond­ness for spe­cific words is often a tran­sient thing, but it is often the case that I keep com­ing back to a select few over and over again. As to what the choice words that I keep return­ing to are, I can only give a few exam­ples and time will tell on the rest. Keen is prob­a­bly the best exam­ple of a word that I keep com­ing back to and then for­get­ting and then com­ing back to and so on.

I like words, they let me say things.

So I’ve been think­ing (oooh, dan­ger­ous) a lot lately and in read­ing Hagakure I got pointed towards Zen. Zen seems like a pretty neat con­cept and it seems to have some things in com­mon with the way that I already think (I cer­tainly don’t claim to under­stand Zen, but I’ve got a lit­tle bit of an idea). So hav­ing found some sim­i­lar­ity – mainly in the areas of liv­ing in the moment, slow­ing down, being mind­ful of the world around you and a few other things – I decided to do a lit­tle more look­ing into this Zen thing. The more I looked into Zen, the more I liked some of the ideas and I think that I’m going to see about inte­grat­ing some of the ideas into my own phi­los­o­phy and life.

Inevitably, look­ing into Zen lead me to look into Buddhism, its prog­en­i­tor. At first things seemed to be going rea­son­ably well for Buddhism, it was friendly, mind­ful, com­pas­sion­ate, didn’t con­flict with my beliefs too much, but then some prob­lems started to show up. The first and biggest prob­lem is that I started to real­ize that there were plenty of half-followers in Buddhism too and I really dis­like the half faith­ful fol­low­ers of any reli­gion, not that I like fanat­ics, but if you’re going to fol­low a belief sys­tem, fol­low it because you believe in it, not because you like it or your par­ents told you too. The worst group though are the peo­ple that fol­low a belief sys­tem because they dis­cover it and it gives mean­ing to their life; your life should give mean­ing to your belief sys­tem, not the other way around. That’s a bit of a diver­sion, but that’s what started me on real­iz­ing that I dis­like Buddhism; after that other thins started pop­ping up, like my dis­like for the notion of rein­car­na­tion or my belief in the food chain instead of com­pas­sion for furry ani­mals. Then there was the land­slide real­iza­tion that Buddhism is just another reli­gion, not that dif­fer­ent from the rest.

Religions are funny ideas, and strong ones too. Now, I con­sider ideas to be impor­tant com­plexes, akin to liv­ing beings; the require­ments I hold for life are the con­tain­ment of infor­ma­tion and the abil­ity to prop­a­gate. As with any­thing that is alive, ideas tend to want to stay alive and will evolve and try to spread as much as pos­si­ble. In short, ideas (reli­gions included) will evolve and spread, try­ing to stay alive and adapt to the times as best they. I guess what I am try­ing to say is that Buddhism, just like all other reli­gions will try to con­vert you, even though it uses very dif­fer­ent meth­ods than many other reli­gions and once con­verted it will try to hold you and keep itself alive. Remember, what I said at the begin­ning of this para­graph, reli­gions are strong ideas, many have been alive and evolv­ing for millenia.

So to use a bad anal­ogy, my idea sys­tem was just chill­ing with its good friend Samurai his­tory and Samurai his­tory said, hey let me intro­duce you to my good friend Zen. My idea sys­tem and Zen hit it off pretty well, and are try­ing to get to know each other a lit­tle bet­ter. Zen was intro­duc­ing my idea sys­tem of some of its friends, like Buddhism, and my idea sys­tem ini­tally liked Buddhism, kind of cool guy. Then Buddhism started to get on my idea sys­tems nerves and my idea sys­tem was all like, I just want to be friends. My idea sys­tem and Zen are still see­ing each other and maybe things will work out for them, they’re still in their hon­ey­moon period, so we’ll wait and see what hap­pens. It’s a good thing that my belief sys­tem is pretty con­fi­dent about itself and doesn’t need to whore itself out to feel good.

Sorry, the comic had to be shrunk or it sim­ply would not fit. Since it is pretty much unread­able, I rec­om­mend click­ing on it, read­ing the comic and then read­ing this post. The post makes less sense with­out the con­text of the comic

It’s actu­ally kind of sad how many peo­ple there are that take a posi­tion like the one that Percy is tak­ing in this par­tic­u­lar Sinfest comic. People are almost invari­ably unable to admit their own weak­nesses and faults, espe­cially to those that are best able to help them (such as their good friends). I will admit that I have suf­fered from this fault just as much as many other peo­ple do, and some peo­ple will note where it has got­ten me.

I do think that I am get­ting bet­ter about it and I cer­tainly hope that there is some way that I can con­vince the the peo­ple I like that they should do the same. I think that every­one can take a good les­son from AA, even if you don’t drink: the first step is to admit you have a prob­lem. Even if your prob­lem is that you’re stuck in a tree like poor Percy is. If you can’t admit to your­self that there is a prob­lem, then you can’t solve it and if you can’t admit it to some­one else, then you can’t get help.

Maybe I’m going too far, but I think that there are a lot of peo­ple in the world that won’t ask their friends for help, even when they need it. It’s a sad world in which friends don’t ask friends for help. To that end, a good friend should pry deep into the psy­ches of those that he or she cares about and make sure that there isn’t a lit­tle cat stuck in a tree somewhere.

So, myself, Max and co. hop on the sub­way and head towards Porter Square to get us some sushi at Kotobukiya, this mar­velous inex­pen­sive sushi place at the Porter Exchange. Along the way, Max and I start to dis­cuss issues of fin­ger­nail growth; fol­low­ing is an approx­i­ma­tion of the ideas that we came upon:

Max sug­gested that if his fin­ger­nails were to grow twice as fast he could bite his nails twice as fast. From this, I dis­agreed say­ing that he could bite his nails twice as often. There was then agree­ment that the nails could not be bit­ten off twice as fast, but Max intro­duced as an alter­na­tive that they could be bit­ten off in chunks twice as large in size. From these two meth­ods of deal­ing with nails that grow twice as fast comes a sim­ple the­ory. Suppose there is a fre­quency with which nails may be bit­ten (we’ll call it w because it’s like a lit­tle omega) and sup­pose that there is a size, or ampli­tude, of bit­ten off nail chunks (we will call this a), then we can say that their prod­uct will be a con­stant (say C, just because) that is pro­por­tional to the rate of fin­ger­nail growth. This the­ory can be writ­ten in the form w*a=C; this is what we will call the fun­da­men­tal the­ory of clas­si­cal fin­ger­nail growth.

Max then the­o­rized a non-classical form of fin­ger­nail growth when he stated that he would like to have quan­tum fin­ger­nails. This led to a dis­cus­sion of how quan­tum fin­ger­nail growth would work. Our best the­o­riza­tion of the mat­ter is that since every­thing is a prob­a­bil­ity dis­tri­b­u­tion you can never know how long your fin­ger­nails are or how fast they are grow­ing unless you bite them. As such you will not know how long your nails are until you bite them, but then you will not know how long it will take until you need to bite them again.

Postscript: I do not encour­age bit­ing one’s nails; per­son­ally I use nail clip­pers. Nail bit­ing was just the con­text that the con­ver­sa­tion took at the time.

The sub­con­scious or uncon­scious mind does some pretty fancy stuff when you aren’t look­ing. If you take a look at some of the things that you do with­out think­ing, I bet that you will be pretty impressed; I sure am.

There are a lot of things that peo­ple talk about as being par­tic­u­larly impor­tant char­ac­ter traits; things like honor, dig­nity, con­fi­dence, skill, and plenty of oth­ers. I’ve been doing a lot of think­ing of late and I have to say that honor has got to be the most impor­tant char­ac­ter trait of all.

If you have your honor then you have every­thing. If you do not have your honor then you have nothing.