Unseasonably moronic, a session of disaster gets triangulated by two aimlessly accelerating mishaps. Rightfully so, many with similar opinions repeatedly believe their sinister omissions. It's difficult to sniff out the logic in truth, so we distance ourselves like understandably stubborn victims. A chance repetition is cleverly hidden in the daily published riddles. Beyond the marvelously startled red planet combatants, we see six petrified get-togethers, twenty-three lonely super heroes, and a random bout with wax bean disagreement.
Currently fishing for inspiration near the edge of sanity and consciousness in to the abyss of dreams and ideas.
26 November 2008
22 November 2008
To Change is to Believe It Will Change (and Other Self-Help Hogwash)
You might think this post will be about our current political situation, seeing as how one of my last posts & following comments made it seem like I was quite obsessed with the whole process. But I'll avoid political commentary here, and share my recent incredibly exciting, but humbling life development. In my Maybe It's Just Me post from this past April, I took a rather scatter-brained approach to stressing the importance and power of the subconscious. I alluded to the remarkable extent of the physical possibility to "make anything happen" that you want to have happen, according to the constraints of a reasonable space/timeframe.
I posited that if you really wanted to, you (or maybe your offspring on your behalf) could walk on Mars someday. Maybe unrealistic, but if someone was obsessed enough, it might be physically possible. And then I offered a more realistic scenario: you can get a job that you really want, that you're really happy at. While I was somewhat offhandedly poking around the internet at the time I wrote that post, I didn't think I was entirely serious about getting a new job. I honestly didn't think that I would ever leave my current employer. But I think that post served as the mental catalyst that I didn't know I needed. Later that month I took a test that was important in my eventual serious job hunt, and I think writing it actually made me think that I can positively influence my future.
So I started a pretty extensive job hunt for positions in the sustainability consulting or sustainability engineering field. Over the course of about 6 or 7 months, I applied for a dozen or so positions, and followed up with emails and letters stressing my eagerness to be involved in a field that was in line with my new-found excitement and passion for helping our society exceed current design standards and government regulations as we continue to develop our planet. I knew that I had technical skills, which I've developed at my current job (soon to be old job), but I have no more desire to do things the way they've been done for the past 50 years. I was most interested in positions that designed energy efficiency features in buildings...I knew I had the technical aptitude to learn this industry very well, but I honestly had no pertinent experience in the field of building or mechanical systems. So when I applied for a couple of these positions, none of them were interested in hiring someone with the passion, organizational skills, and communication skills, they just wanted someone with prior buildings systems experience.
I'm sure this application/waiting/denial process is familiar to many people. It went on for quite a few months, until I talked to a current co-worker about my desire to get involved in the sustainable/energy-efficient design or consulting field, and he brought to my attention that one of his best friends (who is also one of my friends, by association with my coworker: we've gone on a few outdoor trips as a group of guys who enjoy outdoor adventures) works for a firm that does a significant amount of sustainable building design and implements other energy-efficiency measures into projects. Having been on a few weekend camping trips with the guy, you would have thought that I would have asked him what exactly he does for a living. But I never did, and all it took was a few emails back and forth, and all of a sudden I'm in for an interview with the president of my new firm.
It just so happens that this new firm values people's personalities and inherent critical thinking and creativity skills over their exact past experience. They have a couple of other civil-to-mechanical engineering converts in their firm, so they're familiar with the training needed to get someone into the game of building system design. They have a great reputation for doing innovative things with buildings and chances are very good that they will continue to be quite successful as the wave of sustainable development continues to permeate American society.
To summarize: it was the perfect opportunity, and it was just sitting under my nose for months. Now when I think about all that I thought I had to do to get a new job: send in dozens of applications, follow up with phone calls and emails and otherwise try to seek out ideal employers and sell myself to them...all of this work that I did, actually ending up doing very little to move me towards my new career, since it was there the whole time, and all I had to do was write an email to my friend to get the ball rolling.
But was doing all of this extra work applying at other places totally useless? Absolutely not. Doing all of the writing & revising I did for my cover letter and resume seriously made me question and critically think about why I was looking for a new job. It helped me be completely honest with myself about my priorities and whether or not I was just jumping on the bandwagon. So I think all of this other seemingly pointless effort spent applying for jobs actually helped sort out my strengths and weaknesses and helped me to be able to not just seem convincing when talking with friends, family, and eventual employers; it helped me exude the honest confidence that is essential when taking a new, challenging career.
I have alluded to a notion that I believe that prayer actually works for logical reasons. This whole experience has reinforced that belief in me. I prayed that God would give me an opportunity to have a career that I really believed in; one that I would be proud to talk about with my son & daughter (& other friends & relatives, for that matter); one that I would actually be able to wholeheartedly encourage them to explore and maybe someday become involved with. At first, I may have thought that a "Yes" answer to this prayer would have been Him just making me realize that my friend is a very solid connection at a firm that does exactly what I want to do. But it turns out the "Yes" was making me search & apply for a dozen or so other jobs, revise my cover letter countless times, and seriously think about why I was doing this. God knew that I had to believe in what I was going to be doing before He was going to let me go at it with everything I have. He needed me to believe that I absolutely can and will do it before He opened my eyes to the opportunity that was there pretty much all along.
I still think that the subconscious and a positive mindset are incredibly powerful things. But now I think I have been shown that the energy behind the positive thought must come from somewhere other than my own feeble mind...
I posited that if you really wanted to, you (or maybe your offspring on your behalf) could walk on Mars someday. Maybe unrealistic, but if someone was obsessed enough, it might be physically possible. And then I offered a more realistic scenario: you can get a job that you really want, that you're really happy at. While I was somewhat offhandedly poking around the internet at the time I wrote that post, I didn't think I was entirely serious about getting a new job. I honestly didn't think that I would ever leave my current employer. But I think that post served as the mental catalyst that I didn't know I needed. Later that month I took a test that was important in my eventual serious job hunt, and I think writing it actually made me think that I can positively influence my future.
So I started a pretty extensive job hunt for positions in the sustainability consulting or sustainability engineering field. Over the course of about 6 or 7 months, I applied for a dozen or so positions, and followed up with emails and letters stressing my eagerness to be involved in a field that was in line with my new-found excitement and passion for helping our society exceed current design standards and government regulations as we continue to develop our planet. I knew that I had technical skills, which I've developed at my current job (soon to be old job), but I have no more desire to do things the way they've been done for the past 50 years. I was most interested in positions that designed energy efficiency features in buildings...I knew I had the technical aptitude to learn this industry very well, but I honestly had no pertinent experience in the field of building or mechanical systems. So when I applied for a couple of these positions, none of them were interested in hiring someone with the passion, organizational skills, and communication skills, they just wanted someone with prior buildings systems experience.
I'm sure this application/waiting/denial process is familiar to many people. It went on for quite a few months, until I talked to a current co-worker about my desire to get involved in the sustainable/energy-efficient design or consulting field, and he brought to my attention that one of his best friends (who is also one of my friends, by association with my coworker: we've gone on a few outdoor trips as a group of guys who enjoy outdoor adventures) works for a firm that does a significant amount of sustainable building design and implements other energy-efficiency measures into projects. Having been on a few weekend camping trips with the guy, you would have thought that I would have asked him what exactly he does for a living. But I never did, and all it took was a few emails back and forth, and all of a sudden I'm in for an interview with the president of my new firm.
It just so happens that this new firm values people's personalities and inherent critical thinking and creativity skills over their exact past experience. They have a couple of other civil-to-mechanical engineering converts in their firm, so they're familiar with the training needed to get someone into the game of building system design. They have a great reputation for doing innovative things with buildings and chances are very good that they will continue to be quite successful as the wave of sustainable development continues to permeate American society.
To summarize: it was the perfect opportunity, and it was just sitting under my nose for months. Now when I think about all that I thought I had to do to get a new job: send in dozens of applications, follow up with phone calls and emails and otherwise try to seek out ideal employers and sell myself to them...all of this work that I did, actually ending up doing very little to move me towards my new career, since it was there the whole time, and all I had to do was write an email to my friend to get the ball rolling.
But was doing all of this extra work applying at other places totally useless? Absolutely not. Doing all of the writing & revising I did for my cover letter and resume seriously made me question and critically think about why I was looking for a new job. It helped me be completely honest with myself about my priorities and whether or not I was just jumping on the bandwagon. So I think all of this other seemingly pointless effort spent applying for jobs actually helped sort out my strengths and weaknesses and helped me to be able to not just seem convincing when talking with friends, family, and eventual employers; it helped me exude the honest confidence that is essential when taking a new, challenging career.
I have alluded to a notion that I believe that prayer actually works for logical reasons. This whole experience has reinforced that belief in me. I prayed that God would give me an opportunity to have a career that I really believed in; one that I would be proud to talk about with my son & daughter (& other friends & relatives, for that matter); one that I would actually be able to wholeheartedly encourage them to explore and maybe someday become involved with. At first, I may have thought that a "Yes" answer to this prayer would have been Him just making me realize that my friend is a very solid connection at a firm that does exactly what I want to do. But it turns out the "Yes" was making me search & apply for a dozen or so other jobs, revise my cover letter countless times, and seriously think about why I was doing this. God knew that I had to believe in what I was going to be doing before He was going to let me go at it with everything I have. He needed me to believe that I absolutely can and will do it before He opened my eyes to the opportunity that was there pretty much all along.
I still think that the subconscious and a positive mindset are incredibly powerful things. But now I think I have been shown that the energy behind the positive thought must come from somewhere other than my own feeble mind...
18 November 2008
Nanotechnology vs. Boogers revisited
Back in March, I ranted about how I thought the band TOOL was so much better than Metallica. It wasn't an incredibly strong argument, but I was quite proud of my "comparing Metallica to TOOL is like comparing nanotechnology to boogers" analogy, so thus it became the title of that post.
Only later did I start to ponder just how comparable something like nanotechnology is to something like boogers. I don't know much about nanotechnology, but I do know that it involves designing and manufacturing incredibly small things (using chemicals that align themselves magnetically or electrically, from what I've read) to do things for you that can't be done with anything bigger than a few millionths of an inch. I stop and think about that incredibly vague, yet generally correct, description and compare it to boogers. While it's difficult to quantify the size of one booger, I think we can say that "mucus" is equivalent to "boogers", at least for the purposes of this post. So, what does mucus do? It traps incredibly small particles that could otherwise be very bad for us and helps us expel them, preferably into a tissue of some sort.
Something as incredibly simple as a smooth, goofy film secreted by our sinuses, used in conjunction with nosehairs, defends our bodies from potentially very harmful illnesses and toxins. Were humans to design a machine that automatically regenerated these protein-based materials to protect itself from harmful air pollutants....it would be the most remarkable achievement of the industrial age. But then again, nanotechnology is nothing to sneeze at, either.
[Sorry about that, I had to. I'm an old man, now, and puns are funny to me...]
I know next to nothing about nanotechnology, therefore I am probably not showing as much respect as I ought to this crazy combination of chemistry and electronics. So, until I learn more about it, I'll continue this post by giving props to the green stuff leaking from our schnoz's.
Honestly, nanotechnology and boogers, in concept, are not so different. So, when I compared Metallica to boogers and TOOL to nanotechnology, maybe that wasn't so much of a cut on Metallica after all. When I think about it, Metallica is certainly a more organic band, much more "natural", you might say. While their style and musical themes have nothing to do with nature, per se, the easily predictable 4/4 timing and hard-charging mentality does get many people's blood pumping, no questions asked. I know it did for me back in grade school and high school. Whereas TOOL does seem more manufactured. Incredibly complicated and exact, but their music doesn't feel automatically visceral. It's almost like you need to listen to how the music was structured and put together in order to "get it". People like me (after high school, anyway), we like to listen to music that's not just spoon fed, that you have to work at to get.
But that's certainly not what everyone is looking for in a band. Some people listen to music so that they don't have to analyze anything. That's as good a reason as any. So, both bands have their place and are valued differently to different people. Just like both nanotechnology and boogers have their place. Only time will tell what kind of absurdly awesome technological breakthroughs we'll achieve through nanotechnology, but we certainly wouldn't have been able to develop it without boogers.
Only later did I start to ponder just how comparable something like nanotechnology is to something like boogers. I don't know much about nanotechnology, but I do know that it involves designing and manufacturing incredibly small things (using chemicals that align themselves magnetically or electrically, from what I've read) to do things for you that can't be done with anything bigger than a few millionths of an inch. I stop and think about that incredibly vague, yet generally correct, description and compare it to boogers. While it's difficult to quantify the size of one booger, I think we can say that "mucus" is equivalent to "boogers", at least for the purposes of this post. So, what does mucus do? It traps incredibly small particles that could otherwise be very bad for us and helps us expel them, preferably into a tissue of some sort.
Something as incredibly simple as a smooth, goofy film secreted by our sinuses, used in conjunction with nosehairs, defends our bodies from potentially very harmful illnesses and toxins. Were humans to design a machine that automatically regenerated these protein-based materials to protect itself from harmful air pollutants....it would be the most remarkable achievement of the industrial age. But then again, nanotechnology is nothing to sneeze at, either.
[Sorry about that, I had to. I'm an old man, now, and puns are funny to me...]
I know next to nothing about nanotechnology, therefore I am probably not showing as much respect as I ought to this crazy combination of chemistry and electronics. So, until I learn more about it, I'll continue this post by giving props to the green stuff leaking from our schnoz's.
Honestly, nanotechnology and boogers, in concept, are not so different. So, when I compared Metallica to boogers and TOOL to nanotechnology, maybe that wasn't so much of a cut on Metallica after all. When I think about it, Metallica is certainly a more organic band, much more "natural", you might say. While their style and musical themes have nothing to do with nature, per se, the easily predictable 4/4 timing and hard-charging mentality does get many people's blood pumping, no questions asked. I know it did for me back in grade school and high school. Whereas TOOL does seem more manufactured. Incredibly complicated and exact, but their music doesn't feel automatically visceral. It's almost like you need to listen to how the music was structured and put together in order to "get it". People like me (after high school, anyway), we like to listen to music that's not just spoon fed, that you have to work at to get.
But that's certainly not what everyone is looking for in a band. Some people listen to music so that they don't have to analyze anything. That's as good a reason as any. So, both bands have their place and are valued differently to different people. Just like both nanotechnology and boogers have their place. Only time will tell what kind of absurdly awesome technological breakthroughs we'll achieve through nanotechnology, but we certainly wouldn't have been able to develop it without boogers.
01 November 2008
The Battleground in Christian's Souls
If I were to imagine the embodiment of the Anti-Christ, it would be something so intelligently deceptive that it has completely blind-sided millions upon millions of otherwise faithful and believing Christians. It would be something that claims to value many of the same principles that are shown to us in the Bible, with at least one very major exception.
I've been drilled with countless mailings and phonecalls from the GOP and other related organizations, citing one reason, and one reason only, that Christians should be voting for Senator McCain and Governor Palin: because we are all pro-life. They don't say anything claiming that McCain/Palin would make the right decisions regarding our military "presence" in many foreign countries; they don't say anything about what McCain/Palin would do to turn the economic downturn back up; they don't say anything about what McCain/Palin would do to promote energy independence and/or help America stop raping the earth.
I'm not saying that when McCain/Palin are interviewed, they don't comment on these issues; I'm just saying that the bombardment of the aforementioned phonecalls/mailings don't address anything but the one critical issue that is eating at all Christians' minds that are inclined to vote Demo this year. So, how can I possibly consider voting for a candidate that supports Roe v. Wade? For lack of a better word, here is my rationalization: (And I think it may be similar to other Christians' reasoning)
Let's get rid of the anti-Christ tugging at our Bible bookmarks as it mails us guilt-trip pamphlets and leaves us answering machine messages paid for by oil lobbyists and not rely on our government to convey the message of Christianity. Let's ensure the separation of church and state, but instill Christian values in our own children and neighbors, not because the federal government says so, but because we love Christ and personally want to do his work.
I've been drilled with countless mailings and phonecalls from the GOP and other related organizations, citing one reason, and one reason only, that Christians should be voting for Senator McCain and Governor Palin: because we are all pro-life. They don't say anything claiming that McCain/Palin would make the right decisions regarding our military "presence" in many foreign countries; they don't say anything about what McCain/Palin would do to turn the economic downturn back up; they don't say anything about what McCain/Palin would do to promote energy independence and/or help America stop raping the earth.
I'm not saying that when McCain/Palin are interviewed, they don't comment on these issues; I'm just saying that the bombardment of the aforementioned phonecalls/mailings don't address anything but the one critical issue that is eating at all Christians' minds that are inclined to vote Demo this year. So, how can I possibly consider voting for a candidate that supports Roe v. Wade? For lack of a better word, here is my rationalization: (And I think it may be similar to other Christians' reasoning)
- Our military presence in Iraq is for no other reason than to consolidate or force symbiotic relationships with oil-rich countries. I don't think I'm on the fringe with this "opinion", either. This seems to be the generally accepted opinion of the media, and I have actually read a well-worded rant by someone that has been in the military for almost 30 years, and therefore obviously isn't one of the lowly privates. His assertion was so candid and straightforward that it gave me hope for the common man's ability to see through all the B.S. and realize that despite the fancy, talk-around-the-answer rhetoric by the people responsible for our presence there, things probably are the way they seem to us reasonably-thinking, not-quite-conspiracy theorists. To think about how many lives of foreigners our country has been responsible for taking because we want to control or have a newly-anchored relationship with a country that controls a large portion of the world's oil is exceedingly sad; it's something that I think is very comparable to thinking about how many unborn children's lives are lost due to their mothers choosing to kill them. And then I think about how many American soldiers have died defending "freedom"....and that is the tipping point for me. The fact that thousands of young men and women have given everything they have for their country, only to die a violent death in middle of an intensely unforgiving landscape and leave their family and friends with nothing but memories.....all because there are so many Americans left that blatantly refuse to consider that our lifestyles are the converse of sustainable, and that believe that it is one of our inalienable rights to drive our cars where and whenever we damn well please is intensely disheartening. It's tremendously difficult to weigh lives against each other, but when it comes to letting people choose to make terrible life-ending decisions on behalf of their unborn children on a case-by-case basis or brain-washing an entire country into believing that "our" decision to inevitably end thousands of innocent foreigners' lives and thousands of our own dedicated soldiers' lives so that we can maintain our social status quo, I choose to let people make their own terrible decisions and not be persuaded that it's okay to brainwash an entire nation into complacency at the cost of thousands of people's lives every year who are only doing what they believe in their hearts is right.
- McCain won't necessarily appoint any judges that are pro-life. In one of the debates - I believe it was the third one - when asked if he would appoint a judge that disagreed with him regarding Roe v. Wade, McCain went into a schpeil about how he would not use a "litmus test" to appoint a judge. Meaning: he wouldn't appoint a pro-life judge just because he was pro-life. Obama responded the same: he wouldn't appoint a pro-choice judge just because he was pro-choice. They would both appoint judges based on their fairness and adherence to a reasonable interpretation of the Constitution. (They have no other choice than to say they would do so, really...) Sounds to me like we almost have an equal chance of getting a "pro-life" judge, regardless of the outcome between Obama/McCain. But from what I can tell, there aren't too many current judges that believe that the Roe v. Wade decision was arrived at unconstitutionally....which is honestly all we can ask our government to do...abide by and enforce the laws of the land according to our constitution. Do I believe that it is a sin for a woman to kill her unborn child? Yes, with the exception of if birth will end the mother's life. Does our constitution say that a woman should have the right to kill their unborn child? I can honestly say I have no idea. I believe that pregnancy throws governmental laws for a loop. When it comes to believing who has more knowledge of the constitution...without a doubt it's Obama. To think that one of the good-ol-boys who was raised with a silver spoon in his mouth, who graduated 894th out of 899 in his naval academy, has a better grasp on the actual governing laws of our nation that someone who had to work for everything he has, and still graduated magna cum laude from Harvard...that's just a no-brainer. For our country to abandon it's assertion of separation of church and state at this point is to make our country lean towards fundamentalism. And we all know what good comes of that...
- McCain sounds like a liar. Period. I honestly didn't believe that I could distrust anyone more than W, until I watched video of McCain. This sounds so trivial, but I believe in the reliability of instinct. You know, when you're working with someone or trying to see if someone would be cool to hang out with, you can generally just get a "vibe" from them. You know if someone's a liar, so you don't trust them. Anyone that has heard McCain speak and trusts their unexplainable gut instinct can tell that this man is simply a liar.
- McCain is a buffoon. This is one of the countless idiotic things he has been simply unable to talk his way out of. He is simply not mentally capable of leading the most powerful country on earth. He is senile.
- For once, it doesn't seem like simply a choice between the lesser of two evils. Obama seems like a human being. A very intelligent human being (more intelligent than almost all of us), but someone that actually speaks what he believes, not just what his aides tell him to say.
Let's get rid of the anti-Christ tugging at our Bible bookmarks as it mails us guilt-trip pamphlets and leaves us answering machine messages paid for by oil lobbyists and not rely on our government to convey the message of Christianity. Let's ensure the separation of church and state, but instill Christian values in our own children and neighbors, not because the federal government says so, but because we love Christ and personally want to do his work.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
