Have you ever thought...

¨ What it would be like to sweep after every step you took? 

¨ Whether or not a perfect stranger you walk past on the street enjoys walking in nature?

¨ If a cat sees into your soul, better than you can?

¨ What it feels like for a tree to be thirsty?

¨ When people first made oil out of tree nuts?

¨ How often you would sing if you lived in the decade/century you idolize?

¨ What the world looks 1,000 miles from where you are?

¨ When the first time you smiled was?

¨ What your computer would look like if you could see atomic energy spectrums?

¨ Whether or not the itch will stop on its own if you just don't touch it?

¨ If you have a connection to a person who fell in love today?

¨ About the difference between integrity and kindness?

¨ If you had always collected all of those rubber glue dots that are on commercial mailings and made them into a rubber ball, about how big that ball would be?

¨ What a star really sounds like in space, if you were right next to it?

¨ About the image of vegetables eeking out their nutrients and the dissipation into boiling water?

¨ What it would feel like to slide on your belly, if you were a penguin?

¨ What a firework feels like when it explodes, if you could be right next to it?

¨ If something you say to a group of friends triggers a nostalgic memory which invokes in someone an unrelated scent to fill their nostrils? (not food)

¨ How long an idea was in your unconscious before your conscious became aware of it?

¨ What life would have been like, if you had chosen differently?

¨ What life is like, because you didn't? 

Strange Inventions

It's been raining for the past few days here, and today the sun has finally emerged. Therefore, I thought today would be a good day to post some really strange inventions :-) It turns out the Japanese have a word for such objects - Chindogou.

Man Breast Feeder

Apparently, men got jealous that women held their children at chest level to feed them. Holding a bottle to their mouth the regular way just wasn't the same. Or perhaps it has nothing to do with the child at all....Daddy might need to admit to Mommy that he actually feels like a second Mommy.

Hair Drying Tube

I'm pretty sure that this doesn't solve my needs. If I want anything with my hair dryer to be improved, I want it to at least be completely hands-free. And I can only imagine what my hair would look like when it came out. Guess I could start a new cone-hair trend. 

Hay Fever Hat

This one I could have used while living on the East Coast. Instead of having boxes of tissues everywhere, and tissues in my pocket and purse 'just in case', I could have been wearing my tissues on my head the whole time! It's unfortunate when great insights come after the fact...

Full Body Umbrella

This one would actually almost be really useful - aside from the fact that everywhere you went, you would be burdened with this huge mass of dripping plastic. I'm sure you'd make a lot of friends this way.

Broom Shoes

The only way this makes any sense at all is if you are trying to incorporate your precision footwork practice in all of your waking activities. These wouldn't be worn in public, so one would assume that where you can find these shoes, there is also a normal-sized broom and dustpan to be found. Unless you are very adept with your feet (and therefore could justify practicing your footwork) you wouldn't be very successful in cleaning up any crumbs anyway. I would, however, like to watch someone use this in action. I can imagine a graceful Squat and Twist.

Running Alarm Clock

This thing is hilarious and I  think I want one. It's an alarm clock that runs away from you. If you don't wake up and turn it off, or if you try to hit snooze, it jumps off the bedside table and hides from you. It will bump into things and make a lot of noise trying to find said hiding spot - AND it will look for a different hiding spot every day. Nothing like waking up to a stressful cat-and-mouse chase.

Noodle Face Guard

Who needs hair ties? When I'm out on a date looking beautiful, the last thing I need is to pull back my hair - I took an hour to look this good! It obviously makes more sense to keep my beautiful locks hanging free and to put on a noodle face guard. Be honest - she's a hot date.

Prism Reading Glasses

This invention didn't have any description along with it. My theory? I think they are prism reading glasses: Lay down and be completely relaxed while reading! No more neck tension from holding that head up! Prism Glasses take the images of the pages off your book and divert them down so when you lay on your back and look straight up, there's your book!

USB Toaster

Nothing like being artistic with your food. This USB toaster allows you to jack into your computer and toast whatever images you want into them. I guess that means we're going to have a lot more people seeing the Virgin Mary in their toast...

Patience

I think I've found one of those wonderful hints that explains how I got here (here meaning my current state of being). It relates to patience.

I used to be pretty impatient. I was a little fireball in a lot of ways as a kid, feeling free to emotionally explode about any number of meaningless situations. People who can get really angry, and do so frequently (or used to), understand that there's a satisfying element to 'freaking out'. In the short term. And when I was younger, little things were more dramatic and it was the perfect canvas to improve my freaking out.

Somewhere along the line, I started to get a lot of negative response to my abrasive behavior, and I did a U-turn. I flipped inwards and became Switzerland (neutral - or at least, it used to be). Instead of getting angry about things, I either stayed completely opinon-less, or I ignored the situation/allowed myself to be distracted. This is the source of my lack of focus, I'd wager.

Speaking of distraction:

 This is what I came up with when I searched for 'neutral'

Awesome.

Recently I've had a bit of butting heads with someone in my life, and although it added a bit of stress, it was beneficial because it helped illuminate this U-turn that I made Way-Back-When.

What I've extrapolated is that now, not only do I try to avoid angry outbursts, but I work hard to keep a situation completely placid - I'm a peacekeeper of sorts. But what it really does is allow anger to bubble up inside of me and not get released when another of my previous ilk tries to aggress themselves all over the situation (probably not a real word). It also usually doesn't solve the problem.

Worst of all, I seem opinion-less when in fact I have a lot to say.

I wrote a blog entry a little bit ago about my bubbling anger and how I was learning to control it. That was about controlling my anger when its presence was unnecessary in my body. In this instance, it was acceptable to feel anger, and it needed to be released in some fashion or another.

In speaking about my concern with said person the other day, I realized that I was stumbling over my explanation of how I was feeling because I was so infuriated inside. I was trying to be completely fair and rational, but also trying to express the frustration I was feeling. This caused an internal battle, since my anger was too irrational and my approach was too neutral.

Remember the Mr. Men?!
Nostalgia.... 

Ultimately, I got my point across and the situation was resolved. Pat on the back, release of stress, and we're back on the low-stress, happiness road. So how does patience play into this? Though it didn't stand in full confidence this time around, I'm ready for next time. 

Patience can act as an objective filter, allowing anger to emerge in a timely way so as to allow a semi-coherent request to be spoken. Anger, unchecked, can lead to accusation, but allowing it to formulate into a request for the anger-inducing situation to change is preferred. 

A person speaking with this 'checked' anger will speak in a truly powerful voice.

Some of the things I write are shocking to me. I read them and I think, "Really? No kidding. I think most other people learned this when they learned how to first engage in a conversation - when they were 3. People reading this must see it as a flowery way of stating the obvious."

"Twice the amount of a singular digit, combined with twice the amount of an additional singular digit has a sum equal to the amount of four singular digits."

Or...

2+2=4.

See the predicament? Ah, well. Perhaps I am a little late in the game and perhaps I'm working on words coming out of me more than having really intellectual thoughts to write about. Who can say. I'm sure everyone questions what emerges from them on a daily basis, though, and I won't let that deter me.

Persistence and determination - gotta make better acquaintances with those chaps. I've thought we were friends, but it was actually stubbornness in disguise.

Little Miss Stubborn

Atlas Shrugged, the movie

Ok. I'm going to try not to freak out and go into a tangent here, but: I've been lenient.

Lord of the Rings was visually epic. Although they missed a lot of plot lines/details and the Hobbit has yet to be truly honored as the companion masterpiece that it is, it worked out pretty well as a movie triology. So I allowed that.

Harry Potter has been somewhat redeemed, because they finally admitted that an 800 page book can't be made into a decent movie unless it's 5 hours or longer. But the last couple of movies couldn't be fully comprehended unless you'd already read the books, and I would much prefer that they stood on their own as unique artistic creations in their own right, not just a half-explained summary to make money.

The Beach - I'll admit I saw the movie first. However, after reading the book I saw that it was decently represented as a movie, and although similar in many ways, the movie did achieve being a stand alone work of art.

Into the Wild - There were definite weaknesses in the adaptation but they made it an enjoyable journey. Christopher McCandless's character wasn't developed as much as I would have liked in the movie and I didn't have as much empathy towards his adventure as I did in the book. However, they followed the path of the book well enough and it was a complete movie.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - The newest remake disappointed me, although I appreciated their attempt to hone in on the deeply quirky elements of the book. The original movie, however, not only stood in its own right, but I wouldn't even be hurt if people didn't read the book and saw the original movie in this instance.

There's a lot more. I'm looking at a list of over 100 different movies that have been adapted from books, and I won't go through all of the ones I have read/seen. I'm getting to my point now.

I do not approve of making a move out of Atlas Shrugged.

I do not approve of one movie, let alone a trilogy.

To begin. The book flows and expands and must being taken in one large breath. I am not pleased with breaking it into three sections (regardless of the fact that the book is sectioned similarly) and having to wait a year, year and a half, to continue the story.

Second - I do not want to see anyone as John Galt. 

Third - I do not want to see anyone as John Galt.

Fourth - I do not want to see anyone as John Galt. 

In fact, all of her characters are beautiful archetypes that I am averse to seeing characterized by popular actors of today. It feels a little like pointing to a chair and insisting that it is a great representation of Plato's ideal Form of a chair. A bit irrational, no?

There are a lot of movies made from books with deep philosophical undertones - Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now is one that comes to mind.

I don't care.

I'm a fan of capitalism, but not to the overwhelming degree that Ayn Rand is. Her vantage point was with rebellion in her heart, against the horribly oppressive Communist government in Russia. Atlas Shrugged is an aggravated stand against that oppression and an idolizing of the alternative option. Her characters are unyielding and unreasonable. But it's a damn good book.

There is no way her Objectivist philosophy, which is the entire foundation and purpose behind her elaborate fiction about a society that folds in on itself and relies on the strength of the enlightened few to rise from the ashes, will be properly represented in a movie.

I'm open to being proven wrong. But I am also allowing my skepticism to run rampant in this particular instance. They released the trailer for the movie yesterday. And I've mentioned it, so I'm being civil. But I won't post it on here.

If nothing else, please just do me one favor - if you are going to see the movie - PLEASE read the book first.

Gillian Anderson Interview

Recently, I went back with my boyfriend and watched most of the XFiles series. The last seasons start to plummet downhill at an exponential rate, so we almost made it through Season 7. Although they lost fuel to continue a government-conspiracy-cover-up-from-alien-plans-to-colonization-Earth plot line, they stretched it as thin as they could until they just weren't able to pretend anymore. 

I was feeling curious about Gillian Anderson's life outside of the XFiles. I found an interview with her and some of her comments about living in America were quite interesting (she's been back and forth between here and London her whole life):

 "It's easier to be myself here. I can go out wearing whatever the hell I want, no matter how ridiculous it looks. If I do that in America, people look at me like I'm insane. There are aspects of the British press which are incredibly intrusive, but then you'll go to a premiere and someone will ask permission to take a photo, and when you say, "That's enough", they'll back off. In the States, you go to a restaurant and there are people lined up outside with 8x10s of you. Or they just follow you with a video camera. I had someone deliberately rear-end my car a few years ago in L.A., and there was a video camera: they were videoing my reaction. Luckily, I was in a good mood.

I know people who are embarrassed to be American. They don't like showing their passports. It's becoming a scary place. It takes someone very brave not to be quiet, someone who doesn't mind death threats, their life being turned upside down, news cameras outside their door. There is no freedom of speech in America anymore. They are not living up to the constitution. There's so much fear in America and control."

Maybe Americans don't see it as much within the country, but I've definitely seen people not wanting to admit they are American when they travel outside the country. Their usual cover up is Canada, since the accents are close. 

Sometimes it's real embarrassment for the country as a whole, but other times it's just wanting to not be associated with certain images:

Gillian offers a distressing insight. Take Egypt, for example. They've just succeeded in overthrowing a dictatorial regime through revolution, so they can live a free, democratic life. Their most powerful guidepost, however, the United States, has citizens that don't feel free, feel fear to tell the truth, and want to deny they are Americans when they leave the country?

Everything is good in theory - but when it's put in the hands of flawed human beings and brought into reality, it never looks quite the same. 

On the positive, our democratic society has access to a cornucopia of knowledge and has significant personal freedoms compared to most people. That's worthy of inspiring others to ask for what they deserve as human beings. Even if this change doesn't result in a completely ideal world for the Egyptians, there will definitely be significant improvements, and that's nothing to sneeze at. 

The view of Cairo is nothing to sneeze at, either

On a different note:

"I walked in thinking, it's going to be like riding a bicycle. It wasn't. It was like riding a unicycle. I'd been trying so hard to stretch myself in other roles, and to catch myself when I did anything that remotely resembles Scully, that when I was put back in the ring with her, my brain started misfiring."

This is a personally relevant quote for me. Brings me back to my struggles of putting on a filter in my mind to make sure the 'right' thing is released, while subduing what I 'shouldn't' do. Then, somewhere down the line I try to access those oppressed parts of my mind, only to have the empowered parts rebel and misfire on me. 

The good news - it takes time and patience, and I have definitely become more patient in recent days. I'll talk more about patience in another post. 

My conclusion on my searchings - Gillian Anderson, aside from being more beautiful than was obvious in her frumpy FBI clothes in the series, seems to be a really cool person. She has a daughter named Piper Maru, got married the first time in a Buddhist ceremony on a Hawaiian golf course, the second time on an island off the coast of Kenya, and is heavily into philanthropic and charitable organizations. And - she has intelligent, insightful things to speak about. 

I love unexpected inspiration.

Beautiful February

I empathize with the majority of the country that is blanketed in snow - I know what those harsh winters are like. To my great fortune, I am in an area that is more beautiful than I can explain, and on February 6th, it is 73 degrees and gorgeous outside. So, in honor of such a day, I am sharing some more lovely pictures of the area near me where I love to run/hike/look out the window.

My only advice would be - come visit me. 

Apathy

Apathy bothers me more than anger . When I'm angry, I understand the cause, see it coming on, and see it dissipate. Apathy is more elusive. Sometimes I get stuck in an apathetic mindset and I don't know how I got there and worse - how to get out. 

Apathy ties in with desensitization - and we are desensitized in so many ways. Video games desensitize us to rampant violence. Comedy on TV desensitizes us to racist, vulgar humor and makes us critical of others. Lack of healthy outlets to release frustration and anger desensitize us to screaming at one another to get a point across. Impersonal communications such as text or social media desensitize us to how we really connect with others. 

And a personally poignant one - school desensitizes us to learning. 

I was navigating through 'apathy' in Wikipedia and I came across Robert Maynard Hutchins, who I hadn't been previously familiar with. Aside from become the Dean of Yale Law School when he was 30 years old, he has a laundry list of impressive life achievements. As an educational philosopher, he spoke about apathy and the disintegration of our generation. 

His book, The University of Utopia, speaks about a world where students learn about the intellectual concepts behind their majors rather than just the skills to simply 'get it done' - where children are first taught how to communicate with one another and then given the ability to choose for themselves what their school of thought will contain. He talks about having a full range of educational classes which focus on comprehension, rather than just 'getting through the class'. He talks about giving degrees to students who prove masterful comprehension, not just show their 120 credits. 

Utopian, indeed.

There is no question that while going through school my main focus was on getting good grades and getting through it. Not to say that I didn't learn anything, but I was more interested in the simple achievement of crossing the finish line than I was with gathering a deep understanding of the topic which so fascinated me - philosophy. I love philosophy and I loved it then - but it's only now that I'm devoting myself to getting to know it better. 

I'm sure those reading this can remember taking a class because it was pre-requisite credits you needed and you heard it was easy. Did it matter what the subject was? Minimally. And it never becomes as full of an experience as it could have been, and you never learn as much as you could have. 

There are so many distractions outside of class - video games, drinking, social scenes, social media, TV, movies - it's hard enough in this generation to keep focused on school. If the emphasis to really cherish the ability to learn isn't there in the professors, how will it be in the students?

Our culture needs to re-sensitize. Not that we have to become blubbering babies or anything, but we need readjust our grip on reality. If we keep pulling ourselves farther and farther away from reality, there's only so much we can handle before we shut off and ignore it all. 

I think the digital culture is a major culprit, but it doesn't have to be. Technology can aid in our evolution and connection to one another - but people struggle to see the reality that surrounds them when a device is in their midst. It seems more important to type what they are doing, in Facebook, than to actually live it. And the motto for the media and corporations, who keep making more and more and more, seems to be, "if it makes money, who cares what it does to our human culture?" 

Ah, I get apathetic just thinking about it. 

Slov