scarcity equals... ?

wondering whether or not to replace ariel's link with saran wrap's link, i realize that i don't have time to give them both a good, long read. i like them both; the only reason that i was going to switch her link was because there isn't very much space in that little box up there.

so i don't have the time to evaluate these two favorite blogs because i need to wake up early tomorrow. and then i realized that i've booked myself into a corner with mad obligations... work, school, social... and i can't help but see the ease with which a person can do what they love way too much.

i'm all for achieving goals, but in the same way that "a goal is just a dream with a timeline", a death sentence is just life with the remaining days numbered. it would seem that goals are useful only as they stand to encourage consistent effort toward a particular outcome, but never as determinants of the universal meaningfulness of time itself. i've learned just as much from concept-wandering as i have from cramming for an individual subject; probably more, in fact, due to the contributory effects of connecting meaningful ideas from relatively disparate conceptual foundations.

i see many "accomplished" people who are successful in the eyes of the world, but they are over-stressed, under-[or over-]sexed, sleepless and habitually tense. my current boss is one of them. she seems so afraid of wasting her time that she has perptually bypassed today for want of projecting herself into the illusion of a better tomorrow. her plans supercede her actual experience. if i habitualize the use of force to subdue and schedule my life, i fear waking up from the dream only when "mid-life" or some other psychologically jarring crisis occurs. suddenly the realization dawns that so much of life is already gone, but only dimly memorable if not for the plaques on the wall acting as reminders of the milestones. beyond a certain point, it seems that the frenetic pace of achievement just adds up to more wrinkles on an ungracefully aging forehead.

i refuse to wake up some day and be fluent in three languages but little more than a smiling, vapid shadow in the mirror. perseverance requires a certain toughness, but it is a simple thing to deaden the nerve endings of perception and replace sensitivity with objectivity, happiness with success. with time as its currency, at what price must dreams meet reality?

maybe the box needs to be a bit larger to fit all the pieces. or the pieces need to be reshaped to fit the box.

hm...

[ ... ]

the antisocial constructivist
accidental autopoiesis

hoping that my voice sounded properly convincing without crossing the border to overacting, i absently placed the handset back into the cradle. an unpaid sick day, but not the frivolous kind. the attendant aches and congestions that often accompany yearly grappling sessions with the flu [and assorted other pathogenic visitors] were in full display; the world was, for the moment, entirely without scent and utterly bereft of sensory enjoyment.

strange though, over the past week my mind seems to have wandered back to itself after extending outward a little too far. being low on cash and never willing to eat junk food, my lunchtime meal had dwindled to an empanada at the corner deli or an american cheese sandwich and a bag of peanut m&ms. waiting for the first steady paycheck in about nine months is an interesting experience, particularly if your bank account is almost completely empty for a couple of weeks before the check reaches your crumb-snatching paws. as for me, i was in full snatch mode and my daily nutrition intake was suboptimal to say the least. only for about a week, though, i kept telling myself. just one more week.

of course, over the weekend i came down with this flu-thing, and by monday of this week, sleep was the only activity that didn't involve every ounce of available strength. so i slept.

monday: mind still hazy, not fully awake, i reach out while lying on my back in bed, applying a gi choke to an imaginary opponent. from there i run through the basic gracie jujutsu techniques that i've learned over the past few years, shadow-wrestling my way to wakefulness. it may have something to do with having spent the weekend researching judo and reading about the exploits of Masahiko Kimura. one of the reasons why i enjoy martial arts is the vast depth of legend and mythology surrounding it. there is always some way to stay inspired or learn something new.

tuesday: i rolled out of bed and onto the floor, eventually gathering myself up to sit in half-lotus position in front of my invincible old laptop computer. for the next few hours and without any particular underlying motivation, i sit and begin to solidify a precursory knowledge about mysql and php. writing hello world programs to manipulate baby databases and visualizing the streamlining of a flat-file based web app that has been my pet project for the past eon.

wednesday: wake up, go online and search for an apple II emulator. i spend far too much of the rest of the day playing roms for airheart, wings of fury, tron and choplifter. its been years since i last thought about the old apple IIc computer, the first computer i ever wrote code on [BASIC] in the late 1980s... but suddenly, i find myself thinking back.

it seems almost as if my mind had decided to re-orient itself to the core aspects of my life, unearthing the constant things that have continued with me into the present. alot of things have been swirling around recently: ruminations on the nature of instructive vs. constructive education, consideration of tradition vs. the individual, and a few other things that i may write about in the near future. not to mention seeing a girl that i was secretly in love with in high school for the first time in at least two years. and then seeing her again the next weekend and spending the whole night in conversation with her while the party around us dissolved completely into the background. i suppose that would go under the heading of "thoughts about the nature of love", in that i tend to reject romance as a form of affectionate expression for another person.

the cumulative result of this week's unforeseen introspections is a relatively unexplored perspective about life itself. it is very difficult for me to accept the apparent lack of intrisinc purpose to life, especially considering the fact that any attempt at self-determinative thoughts [the setting of long-term goals, for example] are inevitably subject to external, uncontrollable factors that predominate outside of one's own personal mindspace. i can set a goal today, but based on information received tomorrow, my goal may change entirely.

solutions to this problem until now have been either maddeningly insubstantial or overly inflexible. one solution is to set a goal and no matter what happens in the meantime, fulfill that goal. an admirable sentiment on the outside, but to look closer reveals that such rigidity takes life and attempts to cut it into human-sized pieces. the problem is that the infinite complexity of life itself is irreducible to such a limiting perspective, and to force my own actions into such a restrictive mold is to halt personal growth in favor of the illusory promise of mechanistic gain [in the same vein as Einstein's rejection of Euclidean geometry; note to self: explain the link between the two].

i refuse to slave away my life in hopes of retiring well in old age. if i am to live my life, it must be lived as it happens; to live life fully is to accept its inevitable uncertainties.

and yet, the second concept is to simply be as the moment unfolds, neither attempting to control events, nor being crushed under the weight of, for lack of a better term at the moment, existential gravity... to simply live now with neither the limitations of restrictive goals nor the promises of future prosperity. take care of the moment and the future will take take of itself.

more or less, the second idea has formed a rough guide to my thoughts and actions over the past few years, and yet it takes a considerable amount of strength and reserve not to lose sight of the moment, alternating between states of breathless anticipation and depressive pessimism.

From: if i play my cards right, i could be a millionaire/movie star/model/athlete/etc.
   To: there is no meaning to things; just selfish genes and neurons shivering in thought.

so then, how to live outside of artificial rules and ruthless scientific rationalism, while maintaining a coherent sense of self and purposefulness? i suppose it's a question to be asked continually over time; one idea that has slowly come to a state of coalescence [at least clear enough to draft in the most tentative of terms] is that of a "convergent story" metaphor.

long-term goals are often disrupted by the harsh unpredictability of things. it does seem, though, that in order to preserve a sense of meaning in life, that it is necessary to maintain some kind of structure in events. this structure, however, is not necessarily linear; in terms of time, yes [somewhat], but not the events themselves. a fundamental aspect of this idea is that each experience is a series of events. these events necessarily have some overlap between experiences, in that the "human" experience is a culmination of mental states existing previous to the current one. the current sense of self does not exist in a vacuum and is dependent on previous experiences to provide the mind with its substance.

although events overlap, the resulting experiences may be very different. for example: i read a book; later i think about things in a slightly different way, and all of my experiences throughout the day in some way reflect my altered understanding of things due to my interpretation of what i've just read.

so then, the timeline of a human life is not composed of one long string of events, but rather, interconnecting subunits, each comprising their own stories with a meaning that is merged seamlessly into the larger consciousness of the individual. life is not an event in itself, but rather, life takes place within every experience and is subsumed in the reconstructive synthesis of thought processes, whether those cognitions are conscious [in the case of introspection] or unconscious [as some contend happens in dreams or other non-intentional states of mind].

i am now, as i am doing; i am in the future, as i have done in the past, and contine to do; i understand myself as a singular entity as i have sewn together the commonalities of these individual experiences into the fabric of my self; the amorphous self-concept is the reference for the interpretation of future events; this interpretation may, in turn, inspire recursive re-interpretation of past events in light of newly possessed information, which may cause further adjustment of understanding of recent events, and so on.

death is no longer the end of life, in this model of experience; it is simply another experience. it just happens to be one in which your last thought will stay with you for eternity, as the mind cannot contemplate its own death [an idea borrowed from Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, to which i pretend no particularly deep understanding].

at least, it's a fun mental model [ 1 ] [ 2 ] to play with.

everyone is out on field assignments, vacation, meetings or something of the like... so my mind wanders from the day-to-day administrative work to which i've been re-acclimating myself after the long interval between jobs. high-speed internet at the office is great for a restless brain [and broadband streaming-deprived ears.]

oh, and before i forget: a little backdoor into the live365 streaming audio service --

to stream directly from your media player and avoid those annoying "register now" prompt screens:

1. find a station to listen to [for exampe: wonderchill radio]
   
2. copy the address of the station [example: http://www.live365.com/stations/45853]
   
3. paste the address into your handy text editor [like vi or metapad]
   
4. switch the subdirectory name "/stations/" with the name "/play/"
   
5. paste the address into the "play from location" [or something similar] dialog box in your media player
   

voila! streaming radio, no popup window hell.

so then, back to a restless working brain. as my thought process is in the vein of the work that i do, i start to browse anti-corporate web sites, eventually coming to an article entitled The Betrayal of Adam Smith. for the next hour or so, i split my attention between the remaining tasks of the day, the chill grooves streaming out of the cheap, boxy speakers, and the article on the computer screen. tidying up, i take a look at the office book shelf, pick up a book, and unexpectedly smile at the title. it's a book about redesigning the world's social, financial and politicial systems away from the mechanistic psychological hedonism of the Hobbesian perspective.

amused: i work here, at a non-profit organization, spending lull times reading about urban agriculture, anti-corporatism and globalization. it strikes me that last june [june of 2001, that is] i was working as a web designer-slash-"a little of everything else" at a badly managed company whose sole aim was to milk every penny from its clients and boost the management's six-digit pay figures by repressing the employees' salaries. now, i redefine myself as a full-time student who actually has a reason to go to work.

suddenly, life takes a sharp turn. for a change, this direction feels good. if only foresight could leave me so that i wouldn't anticipate the next hairpin curve. i suppose i'll just have to enjoy the view from here, at least until here becomes there.

and what to do then?

take a deep breath and jump off the cliff again. after all, that's what got me here in the first place. but falling deeper also means falling faster; the margin for error narrows as the pace of events accelerates.