Month: April 2018

Curmudgeon’s Lament

Daily Prompt: Cur

Almost always been a grouch. Since the age of four, according to my mother.

I think it is because I was very sick that year, perhaps had a near death experience. That’s my after-the-fact explanation, anyway.

Decades later, I learned the word curmudgeon. One of my mentors was known as “the curmudgeon’s curmudgeon.” He had a heart of gold, and he became a good friend. Never had to paste a fake cheerfulness on my face when I was with him. Yet, he called me “Sunshine.” Haha. I really felt that was funny. This was still during the multiple decades when my first thought every morning was “Fuck. I’m still alive.”

Things are significantly better now. I have even had some stretches of months where my first thought was “at least I can understand waking up and thanking the Great Spirit for bringing me back to life.” But I always sink back into my curmudgeonly ways. It’s not that I’m ungrateful for the comforts I experience. I simply can’t overlook the enormity of the suffering caused by obstinate adherence to outdated moral codes. That is the biggest thing holding most of humanity in bondage, and however blessed I find my person, I wish the Great Spirit would give up its attraction to horror movies.

 

Optimize Your Thinking

A short elaboration on how to cultivate clear and creative thinking…

Compare-Contrast

Connect-Create

Choose with Confidence!

Friends, this is how the human mind works. To compare is inherently to contrast. By doing this basic mental activity, we create new connections in our minds. The burst of creative energy also increases the chances that the tendrils of our mind will reach outside of our skulls, and contact the collective consciousness. This improves the quality of information coming into our awareness, and helps us create multiple options for action. This Compare Contrast Connect Create procedure also allows us to Choose the best option more reliably.

In other words, with known confidence. Even if sometimes the best confidence available is low.

That is life.

Thank you for reading this little elaboration.

Partake of Life!

Wil Stewart

Partake of Life!

Don’t be too timid!

That’s the problem with raising kids.

In order to keep the most boisterous, least thoughtful, greatest risk takers, and those with no depth of character, from destroying their own lives, and those of others in their environment, kids are conditioned to think of others first, not be selfish, etc.

But then the mild, shy, timid, thoughtful, risk adverse, end up being afraid to speak up for themselves, afraid to love and appreciate themselves, and can’t understand that if you are not loving and kind toward yourself, all attempts to be truly kind to others will fail.

This is a sad fact of life.

So remember, all of us have been conditioned by society to prevent the worst acts from the most barbarous 10%, and now that we’re adults, we should do our best to throw off the disguise and become ourselves. As Nietzsche/ Zarathushtra/ Osho /Merwegon said:

The lion must throw off the sheep skin.

Partake, partake of all the flavors of life.

WordPress Daily Prompt: Partake

 

 

 

 

 

Parallel Stanzas

Daily Prompt: Parallel

Reach, reach, reach. Reach for the stars!
No. I’m tired. Why should I?
It’s what we do.
It’s what you do.

Look, look, look. Look around you!
No. That’s boring. Why should I?
It’s what we are born to do.
It’s what you were born to do.

See, see, see. See what’s there, in front of you.
No. I can’t. I’m blind. I like it that way.
No, you’re not. Take off the dark glasses.
No. I live by my own inner light.

Wait, wait, wait. Patience is rewarded!
No. I inhabit the now.
We are creatures of our history and our future.
I am the creation of my own time zone.

 

Mid-Michigan Word Gatherers Prompt: Reach

Nothing is wasted

Mid-Michigan Word Gatherers Prompt

Nothing is wasted. How could it be? We must realize how much effort is required to make the simplest of objects. To manufacture a paper towel for example, requires at least ten, and up to 25 times its weight in water. And that’s supposedly for a modern, efficient paper towel plant. To some, that might seem like waste. The five gallons of water used to make that paper towel. But another way to look at it could be that we are taking humanity that much faster down the path of crisis point. That much sooner to our doom and redemption. That much sooner to the moment when we have no clean water to sustain the vast majority of currently existing communities. That much sooner to the moment when humanity is forced to evolve into a new being. If everyone could visit a paper towel factory, and see the tons of water used, they might have a better understanding of reality. But that’s one thing our current society is doing everything to avoid.

We see CG images on TV and fail to remind ourselves that it’s a layer away from reality. We hide death, and anything that might be related to death. We don’t want to know. And without death, life can’t be complete. Can’t be three dimensional. Can’t be four dimensional. Can’t be real.

It’s the background noise, waste, if you will, that allows the portion of reality that we think is the whole thing, to emerge. It’s the background waste that is the fabric from which the reality we inhabit is formed.

Daily Prompt: Disruptions Come Home To Roost

Daily Prompt: Disrupt

I disrupt others’ plans, activities, lives. I used to think I disrupted unintentionally, but by my teenage years, my inchoate integrity informed me that I enjoyed disrupting, and did it on purpose. I thought I was the broadener of viewpoints. Oh how simple things were then.

Now, disruptions come to roost at my house. As I learned at the steel mill, back in 1976, what goes around, comes around. It took many years to understand the meaning of this profound and pithy statement of resignation and fact.

Just like the Jesus teaching about how hard it is to see the beam in our own eye. Some people think it’s a criticism of humanity, but I think that Jesus was, well in advance of his time, stating the scientific fact that consciousness developed to give its owners’ a heads up about dangers in the outside world. Our eyes, ears, noses, all point outward. Most of us have to rely on others’ outward vision to reflect our own images back to us.

Steel Mill: By Payton Chung from DC, USA (Fiery Finkl Forging) [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Beautiful Bio-Luminescent Luciferase

Daily Prompt: Luminescent 

Firefly Image with Flash (above) and its own light. Attribution: Emmanuelm at English Wikipedia

Way back in 1974, I was already a nerd. I had a summer internship at the National Bureau of Standards (now called the National Institute for Standards and Technology or NIST). My posting was to the micro-calorimetry lab, where I got to work on a project to determine the heat of reaction of the luciferase based chemical reaction that happens in the tail of a firefly. 

At one point, we actually put a live firefly- (this is not the kind we used) in the calorimeter, and watched the heat being given off by the insect. It was a very sensitive instrument, and the energy graph was pretty ragged. But then there was a big spike. The whole unit was opaque, so we couldn’t see anything, but we figured that the firefly was lighting up at that point. Who knows, maybe it was just mad at us and trying to get out. We released it, unharmed. Not so lucky were the ones that got killed for their tails. I wondered if they paid little kids to go collect them.

I was informed of the chemical reaction that allowed the fireflies their trick. That had already been figured out years ago!

It was a fun summer. I realized then that I did not have the patience to work as a scientist, and decided to go to engineering school instead. Twenty years later, I ran across an article in a technical journal about how scientists had finally managed to do something practical by using this compound to make a field kit to measure oxygen levels in streams and other bodies of water.

What I had realized years before was that the scientists were just having fun.

Nothing wrong with that. So did I. And I am still working in the field.

They didn’t pay us much. If we didn’t have family need, we got I think $12.00 a week. It almost paid my part of the gas money I gave to the janitor and the technician who gave me a ride out to Gaithersburg. The janitor was a down to earth, friendly guy. The technician was more of a grouch. I wonder what they thought of me. There were not too many females in technical fields then. Even less than today.

Daily Prompt: Luminescent 

 

Inchoate

Daily Post Prompt

Feathery “scales” of an unknown species of beetle I found on my office door years ago.

­

It seems that there is little love for the word inchoate, at least among the Daily Posters I briefly perused.

This might be the first time I am using it myself, but certainly it is not new to me.

My knowledge of how best to employ “inchoate” is certainly inchoate in the dictionary sense. A beginner’s knowledge.

But inchoate as the Daily Prompt can lead us beyond a dictionary excercise.

Commonly used to refer to negative emotions on the brink of emergence, inchoate anger  is in my repetoir. Inchoate longing is a more frequent guest in my heart. Inchoate fear a permanent resident.

Explore

Bee Head (Scanning Electron Microscope)

There is always more to explore.

You can look out.

You can go out.

You can look in.

You can go in.

Look up, or down.

But if it’s exploring, you have to see things in a new light, even if the things you are seeing are not new, or even new to you.

Every day, our experience reinforces some characteristics of who we think we are, and also offers us the chance to change.

I like to explore insects that I find lying around dead, using my microscopes.

Insects have fascinating structures. Here is a series of scanning electron microscope photos of a bee head, zoomed in to see the ball joint that lets the bee control the position of its antenna. 

Note the varying length of the hairs. Those that would cause interference otherwise are shorter!
Zoom of short hairs on bee antenna.

This last image was obtained at 500x original magnification. Note the 100 micron scale in the upper right. That is 0.1 mm.

When you are looking at something at even 50x, there’s a lot to see! You have to learn to see what’s interesting.

Daily Prompt: Explore