Search This Blog

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Dog's Breakfast.

This morning I woke up abrubtly in the midst of a REM cycle... either one of the cats woke me up by "stretching" (which entails knocking something big to the hardwood floors) or Dawn was reminding me I needed to get going to get to work.

In any case, I woke up stupefied... felt like I was returning from another dimension, my IQ reduced to a mere 4 or so points. I stared at the cat, trying to find something in my head to connect with. Then I stared at Dawn and did the same thing. Something on NPR was talking about terrorism or Bush or big oil companies or the Amazon or something. All things are related.

Shortly, my mind followed suit with my body, yet I remain sluggish today. An appopriate mood to write in.

Reflecting over yesterday's post on originality, I have to commend my new friend Marius on reminding me originality is difficult at best and that one should just do what they do very well. That's good advice, actually. The conflict of being an idealist is that I seem to always need to see the bad side to see the good. This means putting down originality to make my own thoughts seem more than they are, perhaps. I also appreciated his comments about my positive influence on him regarding NASA -- I think we can find a good balance in our discussions and end up with a realistic perspective of NASA. If we do it just right, we may open a wormhole to the future and then go live in a more enlightened age where going to space is easy, fun, and etc. It takes a good person to admit a perspective shift. Marius, you rock.

So I guess I need to figure out what I do well. Hehehe those who know me will be amazed, but I absolutely suck at math. I am good at abstract problem solving (abstract analysis, as found in Calculus) but I never got past Algebra 1 and really was only passed in high school geometry from sheer pity. I decided if I am going to be engineer-like (do I want to be?) I need some better math skills. Since I work for an educational test publisher, we have a pretty badass library and I checked out a textbook to study from. Sheesh. Maybe carpentry. I can't escape the math, either way!!

Someone else at work who I respect said that I have the very rare talent of being a creative technical thinker. I like hearing other people's perspectives on this because to me it seems like an endless stream of complex issues that needs solving by people who aren't familiar with thinking galactic-scale in an infrastructure not suited to innovation. To those at work who are following my blog to find a way to fire me for talking bad about work -- well, I am not necessarily talking about work: I am talking about the world, sometimes. And if I was talking about work (I don't claim I am) wouldn't we want to change that anyway?

Another thing we idealists do: bring in the World when we should bring in only a blade of grass. Everything is interrelated, so a blade of grass leads to... the cosmos (insert space music here). Bringing me back from Earth (I vacation in a little gas giant system in the crab nebula) is a very good idea to help balance the frustration of thinking too large.

So I don't know. Yesterday was frustration with originality. Today is accepting originality as something that's been SO done before. :) Time to go on and do my own damn thing really well.

For goodness sake, someone please tell me what 'WOOT' stands for. Everyone uses it. Not to change the subject.

P.S. I am reading a good book by Greg Bear called "Moving Mars". It's a sweet book published in the early 90s about a future Mars and a science experiment that changes humankind forever. A good, technical read. Pick it up! Do it!!

Monday, August 22, 2005

Originality.

I've been "away" for a while, working on my companion blog, about NASA and the Space Shuttle, and so on.

During this experience and in other areas of my life, I've been grappling with the idea of originality. I realize in an atomic way, my actions and thoughts and so on are unique and original: no one else has the same thoughts and actions in this moment in time as I do, and is therefore original.

This does not really satisfy, however, because thought concepts about what I think about already exist, or other people are better at it than I am. Example:

Throughout my space blog, I starting thinking of space advocacy groups and discovered there already is one. I also thought I was creating a cool blog, but there's other sites that are devoted to space with much more detail and resource than me.

So, what am I contributing? Yes, it's my unique perspective on it all, but how does that further the cause or how does that benefit anyone? For me, it's expression of writing what I experience and hopefully inspiring others (and myself).

Oh well. Here I am again, a new post, a new day, a return to blogger. Let's see what happens.