It always starts with an idea, some strand of thought that gets stuck in my head, circling around, gaining momentum until… a blog post is born. At least in my mind. Not all of them make it on to my blog, it’s a sad reality that most of the blog post stimulating thoughts that occur to me don’t make it this far. Instead, they sit in my mind until, after a while, I find I can’t write about them anymore. My desktops and notebooks (both virtual and physical) are filled with the accumulation of unrealized thoughts over the years.

But a few of them do make it, there are 88 posts on this blog to prove it. Some I made myself write, some I wanted to make a point with, several more are here simply because the words sounded right, a few mark a turning points in my life, many were written while riding waves of emotion - anger, confusion, nostalgia, wistfulness, excitement.

Yet, no matter where I start, what triggers the thoughts, or what my hidden motivations may be for starting to string together pieces of English in a little box on a screen, by the time I’m done, I always have an answer of sorts. A calming of emotions, a semi-cohesive path of thought and, many times, a conclusion that I never intended to come to. It’s what makes those stale thoughts of mine impossible to write, because all those scribbled thoughts are only the beginning, only the questions, and to find the answers I have to utilize every part of my current state of mind to reason out a way to the end - a state of mind that’s constantly in motion.

I’m sure I could start with a thought that occurred to me years ago and tease out some string of reasoning from point A to point B, but it would be a completely different post, and probably take a different path… and my mind is my no means a conservative field, in fact it’s the exactly opposite - the path just might be the only thing that matters.

The act of writing appalls many people, much the same way that to others engineering problems as attractive as similar polarities, there’s just so much effort involved in getting from point A to point B. Who wants to fill pages and pages with laborious work only to arrive at a puny little answer that you draw a box around? It’s a feeling I can certainly relate to. But the thing is, in thinking that way I’ve completely missed the point. Maybe if someone had told me to box my path from point A to point B instead of point B itself (which in all likelihood is different from my neighbor’s point B), maybe I would have discovered that the journey is as rewarding as the process of writing bits of my mind onto this blog. Or maybe I’m just trying to convince myself to get back to doing physics instead of spending hours on this post.

BUT ANYWAYS.

People say they like math because there’s only one right answer, but there are so many ways to discover an answer, there are so many definitions of what an “answer” could be, and… what about all the things you discover while trying to find said “answer”? Math is presented so often as a collection of things you can do with numbers, all directed towards obtaining the correct squiggles to place inside a box but… what if that’s not the point? What was that about engineering not being about the stuff you learn but about the process of learning how to think? What is wrong with all these math teachers?

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy points out that the question is a lot more important than the answer, but perhaps the greatest computer of all space time would have given us the Ultimate Question and then explained that it’s not the Question OR the Answer but the path from the question to the answer that holds the real secrets to Life, the Universe and Everything.

(P.S. What do you think this post’s point A was?)

When I was younger I used to store emotions in the foundations of my house. I’d pick a corner of the room, or really any part of the area that I thought I probably hadn’t used yet and channeled strong feelings, mostly things like sadness, bitterness and frustration into that area. The idea was that those feelings would be stored there until another, happier day, when I could either balance the foundations out with happiness or take away some of that sorrow and deal with it.  In some way I always felt bad for surrounding myself with an overflow of negativity and creating a room founded on loneliness, but it helped me cope. The whole thing is a concept that may take some effort to actually understand, but it made some sense to me as a child.

I never really got around to taking the sadness back out.

More than a decade after I utterly abused the walls of my household - especially my room - I’m sitting here, in my room, wondering what happened to all that emotion. Is it still around in the walls, is that why I never feel at ease in my room? Or did those sadness stones never exist on any level at all, did those stored emotions not exist either? Or, as I’d like to think, did those emotions in the walls get absorbed by time, like most things are prone to doing?

I owe so much to the walls of this house, they were the tools given to me as a child that I didn’t understand how to use but I used it anyways. They gave me places to store emotions and ever-varying patterns to trace and pretend to memorize while voices chase around the room, in addition to, you know, holding up the house.

But, now that I’m thinking about it, I get the suspicion that the payment for using the walls as I did was the creation of the walls within myself. I could live without emotion, I trained myself in the art of shutting myself away. The same walls that helped me throughout childhood nearly killed my future - they could still do so.

It’s a wonderful existential dilemma, trying to sort out your childhood. But the walls are coming down, bit by bit. I got incredibly lucky and met the one person who could shatter my impossible walls and continues to do so and that changes me, this room changes with me. Life is good. And walls are deceptively helpful. I’ll have to see what I can do about getting rid of them altogether.

I miss the AIM days, the days when you could set a status solely for the slightly self-centered purpose of letting people know why you were not sitting in front of the computer at the moment. Or maybe it was to amuse somebody, or to share something of interest, or to hold a strange type of conversation. Whatever the reason, the best part was that after a while, the status ceased to exist, there was no incessant need to preserve it for future observers. Sure, it existed in memory - your memory and possibly that one friend’s memory who thought that status was exceedingly witty, but as time passed on and that memory became less relevant to your life, it slowly faded away.

Half the meaning was contained in its timing anyways. If I revisit some of my chat logs (and nobody besides me actually felt the need to keep logs), I can catch a glimpse of an away message or status here or there. They’re still clever, interesting, and sometimes sweet, but they don’t mean nearly the same to me now as they did then. Faded emotions, outdated inside jokes, completely dead trends.

It was a nice world. The statuses served their purpose (uh, as a status), sometimes triggered conversations, and peacefully left everyone’s mind eventually. But now, in this day and age, sense has seemingly abandoned us. An ability to scroll through a person’s long dead history? Through past statuses that don’t make sense, conversations with people they even don’t remember, all the way to a few choice baby pictures… what purpose could that possibly serve? (hint: why would actually take the effort to do that?) Rest assured, if a historian was looking to write up a piece about somebody, they’d prefer to hear said person’s life story from their own lips. It’s much more interesting that way anyways, I can personally attest to that.

Sometimes I even wish this blog didn’t have nine whole pages of history to confuse curious people. Reading through pages of thought history just doesn’t have nearly the same impact as being there for the posts in their proper time period. And yet, those pages still exist.

This idea of communication through our past keystrokes, yet declaring for the world to hear how much only our present self defines us is strange. Why is there a need for everything to be recorded? I can’t remember the last time I used a completely temporary status message, AIM or other, to report on my life (but that’s the point, isn’t it?).

It’s okay if you’ve done something enjoyable and there’s no pictures of the event, it’s okay if you had an amazing experience and all your friends aren’t subjected to constant gushing. And next time Duke beats UNC, it’s okay if you run outside and just forget about Facebook. I’m working on it too, and I’ve realized: the more I live it, the more I believe it’s true. 

http://xkcd.com/77/

While sanitizing my computer today, I made the mistake of clicking on a file with an interesting title, glancing at the “file preview”, and getting sucked into my own writing, which finally culminated in me almost making myself cry. My younger self would have been proud.

All through today (and really, any time I decide to go through parts of my life) I find the oddest snippets of thoughts floating around. No explanation as to why or how they exist, none was needed at the time, and so they simply exist as a strangely resonant capture of a mood long past. Plaintext files (I love Notepad) with captivating phrases that happened to be running through my mind on a given day and an OpenOffice file with bits of an intriguing plot idea for a novel, complete with awesome sounding quotes and mysteriously clever conversations between characters.

I never write about thoughts here that don’t “come from me”, it’s why every post has a very personal edge, much as I wish they wouldn’t. Because it’s about the thoughts as much as the experience, that’s what imbues these rambles with “leeviness”, that’s what makes them effective. And yet as effective as I’m told some of these are to whomever stumbles upon them, it’s many times more effective when I happen to “stumble upon them”. 

If some other person happened to be digging through my files for some reason, I suspect that none of those random strings of words would have had nearly the same effect on them as it had on me (well… maybe that one that even had me questioning why it existed). Whenever I chance upon my past work, I tend to come away with the impression that my younger self was much more intelligent than I ever gave her credit for. And whenever I have occasion to go through the collection of thoughts on here, I’m drawn in; phrases that clicked with my brain then, surprisingly enough, still fit in perfectly well with my mindset now. My words are far more powerful, more… dangerous? to me than to anybody else.

That’s an interesting way to put it.

Yet if we stop to actually consider all of what has been typed above, it’s really common sense, on some level we all know this. It’s why we connect so much better with people that think like us… similar waves amplify each other, the more alike they are, the larger the amplification. But sometimes I think we forget that the person most like us is ourselves; we try so hard to “find ourselves” that we’ve forgotten to see that one of the best ways to do so is simply to go meet our younger selves. People run away from who they were in the past but sometimes, just sometimes, looking back doesn’t hurt.

Divisions are a part of life, they help us categorize and make snap decisions, I’ve even heard it argued that divides, some are given names like “racism”, are evolutionarily adaptive. So I understand the need and the prevalence of divides - at times - divisions both weaken and strengthen a structure. It’s just that I didn’t see this one coming.

I didn’t realize that selecting an undergraduate school on a college application was akin to deciding, oh you know, something important like Team Jacob or Team Edward. Team Trinitard or Team Pratt Brat, as we affectionately call each other (minus the team part… for now). One for the lifeless job-oriented, number crunching, variable assigning nerds with no social life and one for the jobless, lazy gits with ridiculously easy schedules who only have to deal with a few things called “papers”.

Oh yeah, what happened to mutual admiration anyways? It seems that’s the difference between Trinity and Pratt people and Team Trinitard vs. Team Pratt Brat. Stick the label “Team” in front of anything and anybody who isn’t you is not a person any more, they’re nerds, gits, ‘tards, brats. Mutual respect becomes a foreign concept. We’re not there yet, but if we keep treading this path, maybe we’ll get there eventually. Pratt kids? Oh let them write a few theses and see how they fare. Trinity? Ha, stick them in a math class and watch them flail.

Because Pratt kids obviously can’t write well, nobody knows how they got into college anyways, it can’t have been the essays that distinguished them from the 2400 kids, and speaking of the SAT, Trinity kids obviously can’t do math, I mean their median SAT Math scores are probably around 40 points lower than Pratt’s, that’s maybe two whole questions worth of points given the math curve. 

Where did we the people finally decide where to draw the line between different species anyways? Something like writing style and 40 points on the SAT, was it?

Divides are useful, divides organize. In some system, somewhere, we are clearly separated, what’s printed on the front of all our DukeCards is proof of that, and that probably makes somebody’s life, somewhere, easier. But don’t forget just how little difference that ink actually denotes, if any. It’s not the difference between ‘tards and brats, instead it’s simply people who made a decision to do engineering and people who made the decision to do anything but.

Anything else, motivations, social life (how do you judge a person’s social life anyways, by what ends up on facebook, yeah?), what they think about you (you think they look down on you? hm, I’m thinking of something called projection…), their thought processes (what goes through my mind as I leave an elementary school, folding up a name tag? Numbers? Poetry? Blankness?), this is what you shouldn’t judge by what’s printed on an ID, or sewn on your arm, this is where divides become harmful.

Would you read this differently if I told you what side of that divide I’m on? Or do you already know? Did you really feel it necessarily to bring that particular piece of knowledge into your interpretation of my meaning? Why?

A lifetime ago we read a story in english class about a guy who screwed up everything in his life but managed to die at the right time and so was forever remembered as an artistic visionary. And there was a corollary in that story, something about about others who had pulled off life brilliantly but fluffed up their death and so went unremembered.

It’s scarily right in a way, you could have never hung out with a classmate ever but as long as it seemed like your friendship was blossoming on the last day of high school, that’s what carries on through the march of time as your impression in their minds. You could have been the best of friends but if you leave on awkward terms that’s built into their image and left there to grow.

Hanging out with some person could have been a terribly awkward experience, but as long as you didn’t mess up the ending there’s positivity coming from it along with a belief that next time will be awesome. Or conversely it could have been wonderful except for, you know, the part where you just walked off without saying goodbye.

As humans, we judge experiences by how they feel to us when we look back at them, I realize. Listen to your internal monologues sometimes. Maybe that offhand comment came out worse than I thought it would, maybe they were hiding something important behind their laugh, why couldn’t I have thought of this witty remark at the time? Oh but it doesn’t matter, she smiled at me before she left, I must have come out of it okay after all.

It almost makes sense when you think about it, but what if you have a penchant for getting everything right except the ending? Well then, better start working on it, if you’re going to get anywhere in this world.

Sometimes I think it doesn’t matter what I say in these blog posts, as long as I don’t mess up the ending.

A while back I was at an elementary school, tutoring a second grader and at one point in time, the girl I was tutoring showed distaste when I pointed out the color green. I asked her, “You don’t like green?,” to which she confirmed her dislike for green, and then I told her my favorite color was green. Immediately an “oops” look crossed her face and she quickly informed me that green was an excellent color.

How early does it start?

How early do we start changing our beliefs to that of others, how early do we learn that molding ourselves to whoever surrounds us leads to the best results? When do we get the feeling that disagreeing with others is not the thing to do?

At the same school, a week later, I tutored another second grader. This kid expressed a need for an eraser and so I obliged and retrieved an eraser from the eraser drawer, the only non-pink one, and I told him so. He took a look at the eraser and then got up to open the eraser drawer himself and take out one of the brightest pink ones, telling me, “this one works better”. At which point my inner voice was laughing and nodding, I like this kid. Different situation yet somehow related. Social acceptability regarding color didn’t trump efficiency at the least. So when does THAT consciousness develop?

Is it different for boys and girls? Probably.

Last story. While helping an even younger kid at a summer day care sort of place during pre-orientation she suddenly looked up at me and asked the million dollar question “are you a boy or girl?” (which, by the way, I have to make a note here, I wasn’t offended in the least by this event, so nobody needs to reassure me or anything). After hearing that I was indeed female she cleared up my confusion regarding her confusion by explaining that I wore boy clothes. Ah, is THAT how we’re identify gender nowadays?

It wasn’t that her observation about clothes correlating with gender didn’t have any validity, I was just surprised that that particular form of gender identification had already developed - quite well apparently, and seemingly before other forms of gender identification.

We can learn a lot about our culture through the children. Is this what we want?

Sitting cross-legged on my bed, music - sorted by the heart - on my left leg, a pile of plastic windows on my right, chaos with a purpose in front of me. I can barely see my bed, transferring my life over, as I’ve been doing for the past who knows how long. Listening to the best kind of music from my new tablet - for my new life - and sitting there, thinking. Thinking about Stubernic, what it was, how it happened, everything Mark Ford said about me. Thinking about what didn’t happen and what could have happened, all the other life-changing ways any of it could have gone. Who was there, who wasn’t there, who was supposed to be there, who could have been there. Thinking about what was supposed to happen, thinking about myself - changing up the timeline. Thinking about the future, the legacy, the continuation, what will happen, what may happen, the intermingling of it all. And feeling for all the world like nothing about anything made any sense even if it all does, in a way. Letting it all flow along. Just sitting there, thinking.

Just sitting there, feeling. (Isn’t that what I’ve been trying to do all year?)

*

There’s too much sadness in this house,
Too much tension, too little power,
Too much hate, not enough love.
Countin’ down the days…

It only takes, how long?
An hour, for the weakest to break and shed tears.
There’s no peace, no calm, no place to run,
Except, of course, into the mind.

Accumulated memories, ancient and fresh alike,
Biting words, judgement, selfishness.
It cries out from its pores - help me, save me,
Get me out of here.

Innocence really is bliss,
If only I understood less…
Instead, I am this.
The weakest.

There’s too much sadness in this house,
For life, for living.
It snuffs the heart, it binds the soul,
I’m countin’ down the days.

If you ever want to get anyone’s attention, just pull out a notebook and start writing. On our first flight today, after I did just that, the guy next to me started giving me curious looks, then made an offhand comment about his current tiredness, and, after I put away my notebook, asked, “Are you a writer?”

Curiously enough my knee-jerk reaction answer to that was “No”. No questions asked. Which is weird, because, I guess sometimes I kind of am one. I suppose I meant not professionally or… I don’t know, I write by don’t acknowledge it much in the same way that I totally don’t write poetry.

But anyways, that aside, that was a start to a very interesting plane ride. I spent half of the ride brainstorming words that contained the letters “TLE”, in that order (i.e. prattle), ‘cause I was being weird like that. But it’s the second half that made that particular plane flight notable.

We started talking, my plane buddy and I, about life, about outlooks, about personal history… about stuff. And by now I’m pretty sure sitting around “just talking” has to be my favorite pastimes ever. What really made an impression on me was his positive outlook on life. Positive in a different way than those overly cheery almost fake people, definitely not that - he occasionally used a cuss word, he had a rural texan accent, he wore a cowboy hat the whole time, yet he wasn’t crude, not impolite, not negative. He was just… himself. It wasn’t his demeanor that was positive. It was just… him. If that makes any sense at all.

I found out a lot about him during our discussion. I learned about his family, his jobs, his life… I found out that he took responsibility for his triumphs and failures alike. And deeper, I realized somewhere throughout it all that he saw something about humans that not many people I meet in this day and age see. He understood the mistakes, the lessons, the strange obsessive-like cycles that society creates, the value of happiness (priceless) and how to live life.

Everything he told me was so simple, even cliché (you’re going to make mistakes, just don’t make the same mistake twice), I know that, everyone knows that. Everything that everyone alive should know and understand, what should make up everyone’s common sense. Yet somehow, everything he said is somehow what everybody seems to be severely lacking in today. It wasn’t anything specific, no words in particular, just… my understanding of him, resonated with me as somehow, sadly, something that’s extremely rare nowadays, even if it’s all so simple.

He’s like all of us. He has sorrows - his dad’s death, he has successes - the multimillion truck company he had owned, he has tragedies - slicing his arm open on a knife and henceforth being unable to play guitar among other things, he has small happinesses - when his boy received an academic award and excelled where he had not, and, of course, he has regrets - offers to a brighter future that he’d turned down.

Yet where is he now? He has children he loves, he has discovered the joys of coaching baseball, he has closed his multimillion dollar truck company because of the time burden and pursued a much smaller career. He had made peace with his dad, he has found a life philosophy that causes him to look forward to every day and love everything he does. He’s honest and upfront with his friends and what he thinks they should do. And he has something, that’s extremely important and yet going to the wayside with everything else in his life. He has a wife that he can still just sit down with and talk to for hours and enjoy every bit of it. Which is something so small and (should be) normal, yet…

Our plane was delayed on the taxi for quite a while, while the airplane traffic cleared up a little. Everyone in the plane grumbled about it, but I didn’t care, I had just met the happiest person on earth.