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The voices in the street were loud, as if the dark houses and smooth pavement served as some sort of echo chamber. Laughter. It was brief but jarring as a car door slammed and they walked down to the beach access. There were other noises, whispered voices and forgetting-to-whisper voices…nothing clear or with any kind of message. I closed my eyes and pressed my head against the pillow.
One in the morning, I lay in bed after hearing a car park in front of my house. I heard the laughter and the voices and the slam and the footsteps. Then darkness collapsed on itself once again and streetlights lit up swaying palm trees for no one. It was silent.
I recognized the voices easily. Not that I knew the specific owners of the voices, but it was more that I knew the answers to the questions that the voices posed.
I knew because there have been moments when my voice was released and the sound waves bounced and danced against still houses. The car doors had slammed and we walked down the empty street laughing at nothing. The wind blew softly and I remember noticing the plumeria tree was filled with more flowers than usual. The sky was clear.
It’s a heady feeling knowing the rest of the world is asleep. On the way to my apartment, we used to stroll through the intersection to watch the light turn red, green, yellow, then red again. Once the hush fell and the monkeys in the zoo sent their last cries throughout the park, the ocean was loud enough to hear.
And then there’s the final stumble and giggle when the final destination is reached. Home, with sandy feet or smoke and sweat drenched body, I used to listen to the memory-dense space in the whisper hours, limbs spread out on a sheet-covered air mattress.
The distorted street voices I understand clearly. Each outburst of night laughter I know the source. Those people, the only ones awake in the entire world, I recognize. I can pretend to be asleep and not make a noise or turn a light on, if only they promise to do the same for me.
The more I’m able to look back at myself and my peers, the more I’m able to see our gaping flaws, as well as our amazing attributes.
I’m open to other interpretations of our generation, so tell me what you think. But here’s what I’ve found to be true–
Amazing attribute #1: Communication
We communicate well, and with all the quickness that txt messaging, IM’s, twitter, and social networks allow. We’re not afraid to speak our mind, especially on the internet. We’re able to create niches for ourselves. Whether it be on DeviantArt, FanFiction, or a home made zine, we find people to relate with. We create, and then communicate.
Amazing attribute #2: Brightness
Those new tools I mentioned above? We ignore the instructions and are able to figure them out faster than most adults. Though it may not be obvious in the conventional ways, we’re bright.
Amazing attribute #3: Sense of humor
This most recently came to my notice while reading an article about the show quarterlife. The article was on the failure of quaterlife as a regular TV show, but it also said how quarterlife probably wouldn’t have been any more successful on the internet. It said that comedy and unscripted type shows got the most viewership. This made me think about what videos I usually watched on the YouTube…and, true to the article’s hypothesis, they were mostly comedy. Does this mean we appreciate comedy better? Does it mean we laugh more?
Flaw #1: Pretention
It seems that these days you can’t swing Nietzsche’s dead carcass without hitting a group of brooding teenagers drinking bad coffee, and spouting the meaning of life with such certainty they should be crucified. Can someone please tell us that we’re full of shit?
Flaw #2: Imbalance
I’m not sure if this is just at my school, but none of us are getting proper sleep or proper nutrition. Though I don’t drink soda, Coke is a staple for most. The cafeteria hands students energy drinks that claim benefits but actually hurt our bodies. Preservatives. Hydrogenated oils. Death in an air sealed bag. Plus, the fact that my friends talk about getting under 4 hours of sleep each night and accept it as normal. Are we all going to die dramatically young?
Flaw #3: ???
I feel like there is something else, but I can’t put my finger on it. I guess this is where you add your own.
Anyways, I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and it feels good to write it all out. I’ve been dealing recently with Flaw #1, probably because I prefer the DIY/underground culture over the mainstream one. I’ve noticed that this is where the boundaries between “integrity” and “pretention” blur together so gracefully. It’s hard not to laugh at how seriously we take ourselves.
Let me know what you, O Wise Reader, think about all of this.
For a while now, I’ve been afraid of what I was going to be when I grew up. Questions like, “what’s your major?” rose my hackles defensively. Why am I required to think about my future in those terms?
I am a multimedia person; dancing around from passion to passion on a rotating basis, or sometimes gathering them all together simultaneously, I vigorously love what I do (whatever it may be). Writing, environmental science, art, blogging, music, reading, nature, and many other deviations are are all things that I love thinking about, and doing. Where did I fit in the world?
I was thinking about this today gearing up to start laying out the new issue of the school newspaper. I was thinking about how aimlessly I was wandering off the proverbial path (and the ruts) of life. I was thinking about integrity–what it means to hold on to a vague, foggy sort of dream, and not let go of it. Was it foolish of me? Would I eventually lose my grip and fall into oblivion, or worse, bland normality?
I’ve gone through periods where I’ve been afraid of the path I was going down, and its unclear conclusions. I’ve felt doubt before; I’ve been depressed. I’ve been shy, overly outgoing, confused, hopeful, understanding, sad…and I expect that I’ll be all of these things again. In the past week, though, I have felt as though I’ve taken a step forward, using all of these strong emotions that I’ve been feeling about my future, both good and bad. It hasn’t been directly linked to the events that have been going on, but more of a constant absorption of information from my entire life that finally just made sense in the most right way possible. Stuff that I felt was important at the time, but maybe didn’t fully comprehend, finally fit together in perfect jigsaw formation.
And yes, part of this aha! moment did happen in the shower, washing my hair. That part was the illumination of a new possible passion–education. It had never registered before as something that I’d like to pursue. Even as a writer for Students 2.0, I felt that teaching wasn’t me; that it wouldn’t make me happy. I think I was wrong. I think I didn’t know what being a teacher meant, and now I do, if only a little bit more.
I’m not sure exactly what I’ve realized. But I have found out what I know. I was wandering off the beaten path , doing whatever moved me, when I found people with energy and intelligence who wanted to collaborate with me to make something great. It happened, and it’s happening. I loved what I was/am doing. Suddenly, late one night, I got pulled off of my joyful way to have a little skype chat with people across the world about something I’m passionate about. For the first time, I realized that I was teaching (while simultaneously learning), and it felt good. Actually, it felt better than good. That set off a chain reaction, and more teaching opportunities came up–more sharing of passion and ideas and energy. I knew that it felt right.
There are certain things in my life, I’m realizing, that come to me naturally. These things I love. The ambiguity clearing is a step forward; the things that I’ve been holding onto so tightly are slowly taking shape.
The important idea that I’ve come to understand these past few days is that the goal is not the dream. The concept of a palpable goal is something that has been pounded into the heads of impressionable teenagers that go on to grow up pounding the idea into more teenagers’ heads. The goal is inescapable failure. Only in self trust and self belief, when the dream we cling to becomes clearer, that is truly success.
We can look at this in relation to education. A goal is presented that guarantees approval and success when it’s reached by students. Let’s call this idea Grades and Syllabi. Or, it can be called old school learning. There is a clear definition between right and wrong, teacher and student, success and failure. This is the kind of teaching that turned me off of pursuing education as a passion, and it is very limiting as a student. Having an unique idea and being given the freedom to cling to that idea and let it materialize in our hands is what interests me as a student.
When the classroom becomes less of an inhibitor–less of a goal mongering black and white environment–that is when more students will be able to free their minds, and let the idea of following a passion stop having such negative connotations. Breaking down walls between classrooms, students, teachers, countries, races, sexes…and anything else really does bring about positive change first in our own lives, and then in the world.
All of this has helped me take a new step in my life. The change has occurred, and I feel excited to start seeing things through a new perspective.
In class the other day we watched the famous experiment by Milgram about human obedience. The first time I saw this film (I was in a ninth grade anthropology course), I was shocked, upset, and all the other emotions that basically everyone feels after watching it. The second time, I still felt these things, but to a much lesser extent. The third time I saw this, I was numb. I had gotten used to the idea that some people obey authority without questioning it, and that the nervous laughter of the subjects didn’t mean they were sadistic.
I can get all philosophical on you and ask “what is free will?”, or get all AP Psych and say, “Why was I numb/used to the scary ideas put forth in this video the third time I watched it? What would Maslow have to say about this?”. But I’ll save that for another time when I’m not dead tired from having stayed up all night watching a French interpretation of Romeo and Juliette in the Hawaii Opera Theatre performance.
The post-Milgram discussion in class was illuminating (almost like being turned to the light–sorry, everyone in the class is now Plato obsessed). We started by asking these questions:
1. What is society (the collective)?
2. What is an individual?
3. What is the obligation of a society to an individual?
4. What is the obligation of an individual to society?
Here are some of the answers that we came up with:
1. Society
=A group of people who believe in similar things (social norms, the same rules)
=A group of individuals tied together by a common thread
2. Individual
=one person
=has self serving interists–> survival
=one self operating mind
=personality traits (unique?)
3. Obigations of society to individual
=to not make the individual compromise so much they desert society
=provide secure environment
=no contadictions
=structure, order
=NONE?
=no contradictions in social rules, laws
=predictability
= safe, content, entertained (Teacher: “What, like the Colosseum?” Student: “Didn’t you hear? Reality TV is the new Colosseum.”)
4. Obligations of individual to society
=obey social norms that garauntee the safety of society
=contribute something to sustain society
=keep it alive (which is in our own interest)
=civil disobidience
=NONE?
We had a really long discussion on what we thought “obligations” meant. Did it mean that the individual or that the society HAD to do something? Do obligations equate to no free will?
We decided that obligations simply meant that in order for society to survive, they needed to be done. A person doesn’t HAVE to do them–they can run out and join Thoreau at Walden Pond if they want.
Another interesting point that was brought up was the idea of social norms. Are social norms merely the middle of the Bell chart?
Anyways, that’s it. I have TONS more stuff to write about, all inspired by Ideas in Western Literature.
I observe a place around me that is filled with cement and tall metal things. I observe a rainbow in the sky when it rains. I observe the inside of my I lids. I observe an ocean that is blue, green, and sometimes brown. I observe men wearing aftershave on television telling me what I should believe. I observe teachers telling me that there are finals coming up next week. I observe that my schedule is filled. I observe mouths moving. I observe a messy bedroom. I observe a small red circle on my face. I observe undereye circles in the mirror. I observe a hamburger. I observe a coke. I observe my yoga instructor upside down. I observe someone who is too young to die and too old to have fun. I observe a life. I observe a soul. I observe…
Let’s be honest. I have no technological skills whatsoever. In fact, I just got internet connection a year ago. Yes, I can edit a movie in Final Cut, and do some reasonably cool damage on a picture in Photoshop. But do I know how to design anything on the internet? That’s a big no. Do I even know how to network a blog correctly? No. Hacking (or whatever you call it)? No. HTML? No. Java? Yes please, with some milk.
Doing a paper for school back then either meant that I typed them up on my ancient laptop and used my iPod as an external hard drive, or I hand wrote them and transcribed them onto a school computer. It was complicated, and it gave me a headache. I also had to deal with the fact that my laptop had 20 gigs (is that how you spell it?) of hard drive and it was mostly being taken up by music and my films. I was often given the cheery message that my computer was going to crash if I tried to virtually stuff its face any more.
Though my computer situation was frightfully difficult, my real life seemed so simple. Coming home meant I had plenty of time for reading and doing homework. Maybe some extra credit thrown in there. Plus 10 hours of sleep every night. Introduce a beautiful specimen of a computer (my fatty iMac), and time slips so easily from my gentle grasp.
Train of thought: Hmm let’s check out youtube. Pimplywimp added another video. Cool, I have to watch that. Myspace? New messages, new commments, new photo commments. Facebook? 5 new notifications. Email? Oh I HAVE to email her back, it’s for this club for school. After that I can start my paper. Hmm Word is taking so long to load. I’ll check and see who’s on AIM.
Hours. I come home at 5:00, I finish my internet to-do list by 7:30. Where has time gone? This type of entertainment was never available to me before. Like a gateway drug, this computer stuff launched me into some unwanted addictions. Speaking of, email check break.
Getting back to writing this post hours later, I am shocked by my point. The internet seems like a tool that can be used for good, and for evil. But has anything changed since that fateful “on” button was pushed?
Yes, it has. Exercising my willpower, I have stopped gratuitous internet usage. Now it’s more music/learning/writing centric. I download music nonstop, checking out new bands on wikipedia. I learn interesting facts and make connection using different internet tools. I write in this blog somewhat obsessively, releasing my gibberish into the blogosphere. I explore the world through other people’s eyes.
Blatantly obvious from my blog, I am not a techy. I am an aspiring writer/artist/crazy fool who tries to get her words out there through this wonderful thing called a blog, using the huge and dazzling high speed connection to infinity. With my deer eyes in the headlights, I gaze at this new world that I’ve created for myself, despite my stumbling around complicated technological things. Like Arthus said in his Students 2.0 post, I create this reality. It’s mine. My choices are law, and I have veto power on anything (ctrl alt delete, you know?).
Now my question is, if I can piece together my own reality here, why can’t I do it in real life?
I really am on a role tonight! Probably because I keep getting woken up by the horrid feeling of my body attempting to hack out my lungs. My sore throat has now evolved into a cough. YUCK YUCK YUCK!!
Anyways, just found this quote on an interesting blog I found called Hazel8500 (link is on the sidebar), and I wanted to share it:
Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. p. 329
“Kali represents the entire physical plane. She is the drama, tragedy, humor, and sorrow of life. She is the brother, father, sister, mother, lover, and friend. She is the fiend, monster, beast, and brute. She is the sun and the ocean. She is the grass and the dew. She is our sense of accomplishment and our sense of doing worthwhile. Our thrill of discovery is a pendant on her bracelet. Our gratification is a spot of color on her cheek. Our sense of importance is the bell on her ankle.
The full and seductive, terrible and wonderful earth mother always has something to offer.”
Robert Persig is talking about Kali Ma…
When I first started blogging about nine months ago, it seemed like a big mysterious world of unlimited possibilities. It seemed like nothing but good could come from this experience. Little did I know of the danger that can come of freeing yourself on the screens of faceless, nameless people. Worse, on the screens of very real, very personal people.
Everything that I have written in this blog, I have written with one purpose: to understand myself better. Consequently, I think it has improved my personal voice. I haven’t written these words to hurt the people that I love the most. In fact, this blog has been mostly for selfish purposes, with only my benefit in mind.
We all hurt the ones we love the most. It has happen so many times before, to a countless amount of people. It is not uncommon. But no matter how many times a mother, father, sister, brother, friend, fill in the blank gets hurt by thoughtlessness, it never dulls the aching pain they feel.
What can you do when this happens? What can you say to make it better? What ideals should you compromise to make them feel good again? How do you know what’s right? How can you trust yourself after something like this has happened?
These are things that I need to think about. I am slightly fanatically attached to my values, and I think that this behavior lends itself to a certain amount of selfishness…or uncompromising behavior? I can’t think of the right word. But when I feel that something is right, I will not bend. So what’s right, what’s wrong? Do you trust yourself or the one you love?
I guess I have a lot to learn.
“It is going down into the abyss that you recover the treasures of life,” wrote mythologist Joseph Campbell. “Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.”
This quote was in my Free Will Astrology horoscope last week. It was also the week where something just flipped off (or on, maybe) in my soul and brain. It happened during Donnie Darko (not because, necessarily, but more aided by). From there on I had this feeling in my gut that I couldn’t shake off. It just stayed with me the entire day and I felt extremely confused and in the “abyss” that Joseph Campbell might have been talking about. I didn’t feel bad at all. I felt this emotion that I shouldn’t even start trying to explain. I guess it was a mixture of melancholy, extreme love, extreme sadness and some unknown ingredient that I can’t put my finger on. I was in the abyss, and I was waiting for myself to stumble.
It was about an hour and a half ago that I “stumbled”. I was walking down middle field after my last class holding my PB&J and sprite in my hands, and I was thinking about the answers to the questions of life, the universe, and everything. I was thinking that the Answer must be here somewhere, because matter can not be created or destroyed. Everything connects, everything is one thing, and that one thing is the answer. This theory only works, though, if there’s continuity in life. It’s a phrase that’s used in movies when describing how everything adds up, or makes sense. Not only is it talking about the logic of the plot, but it also means when Bob is wearing a white shirt in scene five, he needs to wear that same shirt in scene six. That sort of thing. So if everything has continuity, then my theory works.
I also felt like stuff has been happening, coincidence stuff, that has been pushing me down this path. Well, maybe not pushing necessarily, but here’s an example: today in English, I was reading an article about breast milk lacking vitamin D, and someone across the room just randomly said “vitamin D” in their conversation; I was looking at the word answer earlier in the blog, and it just looked like such an odd word, and someone in the movie in my mom’s room (Being John Malkovich) said “answer”; in the Weekly, I read an article about a movie about Stanley Kubrick (directed A Clockwork Orange, 2001: Space Odyssey) called Color Me Kubrick has John Malkovich in it, which I rented on Tuesday night; I’d had a discussion with my mom about summer travels yesterday night (and how I’m to young to travel by myself), and I flipped my new Seventeen Magazine to a page that said “How to talk to your parents about summer travels”. I think I need an existential detective…
Excerpt From New Science Magazine:
Why we are here
If retrocausality is real, it might even explain why life exists in the universe – exactly why the universe is so “finely tuned” for human habitation. Some physicists search for deeper laws to explain this fine-tuning, while others say there are millions of universes, each with different laws, so one universe could quite easily have the right laws by chance and, of course, that’s the one we’re in.
Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University in Sydney, suggests another possibility: the universe might actually be able to fine-tune itself. If you assume the laws of physics do not reside outside the physical universe, but rather are part of it, they can only be as precise as can be calculated from the total information content of the universe. The universe’s information content is limited by its size, so just after the big bang, while the universe was still infinitesimally small, there may have been wiggle room, or imprecision, in the laws of nature.
And room for retrocausality. If it exists, the presence of conscious observers later in history could exert an influence on those first moments, shaping the laws of physics to be favorable for life. This may seem circular: life exists to make the universe suitable for life. If causality works both forwards and backwards, however, consistency between the past and the future is all that matters. “It offends our common-sense view of the world, but there’s nothing to prevent causal influences from going both ways in time,” Davies says. “If the conditions necessary for life are somehow written into the universe at the big bang, there must be some sort of two-way link.” (I found this on the Donnie Darko fan site…you see what I mean about something pushing me down this path?)
That’s what I believe. Riding my bike to the store today, I had the chance to think about all of this. This is basically my train of thought:
I threw my bike lock keys into my purse and I grabbed my bike and pushed off onto the street. The air was so cool against my warm face; inside our house today felt like a sauna. I started riding and the wind carried sweet scents of plumeria to my nose. The molecules in the plumeria are incredibly tiny compared to it, the plumeria itself is tiny compared to me, I am incredibly tiny compared to the Earth, and the Earth is incredibly tiny compared to the galaxy, and the galaxy is incredibly tiny compared to the universe. But maybe I was thinking about that in the wrong way. Should things like this be understood by size? I mentally zoom up and up and up, seeing further than religions, than countries, than borders, than worlds and shapes. The mind is amazing, and maybe there are things that we don’t know about it, maybe the entire universe is in, or controlled by our minds? The paths that we take, each living organism (even the phytoplankton and the trees), are so invariably linked to each other. Six degrees of separation? What about none? Our realities are so interlinked that maybe we aren’t billions of people living on the same crust of a planet. Maybe we are truly one. Maybe there are millions of universes staked on top of each other. Steven Hawking’s view is that the string theory landscape is populated by the set of all possible histories. Rather than a branching set of individual universes, every possible version of a single universe exists simultaneously in a state of quantum superposition. When you choose to make a measurement, you select from this landscape a subset of histories that share the specific features measured. Not by distance. The history of the universe – for you the observer – is derived from that subset of histories. In other words, you choose your past.
I believe that all of our realities are quantum superpositioned, like the universes. That there is an infinite amount choices and paths simultaneously existing together as one. This is where the divine being comes into play for me. God is omnipotent, and we are all one, so a logical conclusion is that we are all “God” or we all are divine beings that are linked in a state of togetherness.
I jump off my bike–I am at Longs. The air is filled with smoke from the BBQ going on at the farmer’s market in the parking lot. I chain my bike to the metal post, jump out and head for the automatic sliding doors. I’ve decided to dye my hair purple.
Have a nice day, quantum superpositioned God person.
