Doldrums

Week three without internet continues apace. Yeah, incommunicado is I. Finals swamped me, and then so did the move to the summer digs. Now, all I do is spend hours each day...not blogging. Far from being the intolerable pit of silence I had expected, though, this time has passed enjoyably. I've had the time and inclination to do a fair bit of reading: finally finishing up on the Blank Slate, about 150 issues of various comics, and a few other works of fiction. I would elaborate but I have been at the university library for a few hours now and I need to eat something. So...

Mr. Singularity
Freewheeling Commentary and Snark Services (prospective)
Answering the Call of Knowledge, for over a few months!
NEW SUMMER HOURS
an hour or two a week depending on the weather lolol

Affiliation

Investigation continues into the nature of this planet and its strange cultures. In the mean time, my brain is cooking up a killer post, expect it later this week. I am on the cancerous blog roll now, and I have obligations to keep, wot wot.

Thwarted again, again?

The waning moon is overhead on a beautiful, cloudless night, the kind I expect to enjoy here in Lubbock virtually every night. Virtually, because on the one special night, we of the Llano Estacado were draped in...fog. Horrible, thick fog that polluted my vision with diffuse sodium streetlight, and obscured even the moon. Yes, the moon, and the incipient lunar eclipse! Sh*t, piss, and corruption upon you, capricious weather. The last time I wanted to see the eclipse the same thing happened; this means that in my entire life I have never clearly seen an eclipse. That being said, the sight of a lunar eclipse is not an entirely special event, so common they are in...hmm...astronomical time. I will see another, discounting the chance of a horrible early death or loss of eyesight. No loss there, right?

The new goal, from my perspective, would not merely be to see an eclipse. It would be, in true space-faring style, to see it from the moon itself. As the sun is occluded, one would be bathed in the fiery glow of all Earth's sunrises at once. A red stellar halo. What luck that the apparent size of the Earth, Moon, and Sun are the same when viewed form each other! On Earth, the real show comes from solar eclipses, and rare they are for us flatlanders. On the moon, the lunar eclipse is not only prettier, but relatively common. Cheers!

No longer thwarted!

To hell with it. I just sent in the internship application, and I feel much better about things. A few conversations later with classmates and professors after having earlier resigned myself to not applying, and especially after seeing this blog's first comment, I felt a bit different. A 180-degree reversal of course, kind of different. I am not often confronted in such a way by my irrationality, but on the bright side I think my Wisdom statistic has increased by an infinitesimal bit. This has definitely been an interesting week for me.

De ceci, je suis absolument certain! Living and learning.

Thwarted Again!

Being the consummate internet lurker and aficionado, one would think I would be on top of all of the various and wonderful happenings within the aerospace industry. Actually, I do know things, but sometimes that knowledge come too late. Blue Origin is a fascinating company involved in the private spaceflight industry, and it turns out they were offering internships. Never mind that they are located thousands of miles away from my home; that bothers me not at all. But the application deadline is this week, and so I am thus rendered a bit...hmm... disappointed in myself. And with the current buzz about SpaceShipTwo, I've been riding high on this mood of optimism about space. Yes, I have been thwarted. No, it is not the end of the world. I have time enough for many things, so now back to listening to my ska collection. The Planet Smashers are awesome.

Continuation

School has begun. Information density has reached criticality. I am now awash in the sea of ideas. Short form:

-Ron Paul's disappointing past associations with racists.
It turns out the Lew Rockwell was behind a bunch of it. I used to read articles at LRC quite often, but I was even then aware of a certain edge articles there possessed, a rage I could not understand. This has been an important experience for me, because never before have I invested so much of myself in politics. I hope the future is not quite so full of disillusionment, set against the encroaching power of the state.

-Random science knowledge
Solid state cooling? Totally awesome. I find myself thinking of ways to use thermoelectric cooling devices on spacecraft. Sonoluminescence and bubble fusion? I immediately imagine freak mutant pistol shrimp attacking submarines en mass with nuclear claws of pure destruction.

-I purchased my new textbooks, and I am already beginning to fear the subject of fluid dynamics. Page twenty already has five-term integrals, and illustrations with so many notes and so many Greek letters whose names I do not know, and I cringe. I may exaggerate, but so it goes.

-My radio shift at the school station is going to be assigned soon. In a few days, radio waves carrying my voice (and def funky beats) will beam into space, assuring my immortality in a way that is utterly inappreciable, yet still fun enough for me to think it interesting.

Blogging will be light, though I hope to eventually produce more substantial material. Blessed be.

Stars

After years adrift in the sea of information, I have finally decided to come ashore. So shall it be written, so shall it ever be.

I've been home for awhile, away from the comfort of my college hovel, and invariably the "Frisco Syndrome" has set in. This place has always exemplified isolation, and it has always brought about an equilibrium of mulling around a home, reading, and generally wasting time. Whenever this is violated (say, by social occasions), it pulls us back to the unhappy rest state. I watch it happen to others, and also to myself. And so here I am, determined to be happy as this day dies.

I am happy. I went outside to smoke my birthday gift tobacco pipe, and all I could see outside of this suburban sphere was the globe of stars; Orion, in particular, was brilliantly located in front of me, that figure of legend, the hunter, the hero. Gone are the days when I could name the other constellations, but it would certainly be possible to regain that faculty of looking out, and instead of seeing points of light, see monsters and gods rotating overhead in slow nighttime procession. I take joy in seeing those things as I focus, yet I can also imagine somehow having a visor, or exquisitely educated brain, and seeing Gemini and Cassiopeia and Draco instead of stars as the default. The stars, points of light with no real meaning but emission spectra and luminosity magnitude, have little meaning for me. At least not normally.

For now, they are legends and adventures. Physical idea tags of history and art. In the slow dance one could see proof of devotion to that old knowledge. Better this, than the lack of appreciation most exhibit.

Even so, I demand more of this world than anecdote and trivia. Deep meaning comes from places and people, and new ideas. When I saw the aircraft flying overhead, this night, I could almost see them as stars themselves, though transient ones. We add thousands of stars each night to our sky. Some are even permanent now, fixed in orbit above us. Sometimes these stars carry or house people. And I am one to think that those stars, filled with people and their myriad stories and experiences, are worth more than a ball of plasma with a sixteen character alphanumeric ID. Better even than the old stories that still shape our civilization.

I believe my optimism and futurist hope shine through whatever situation I am in now, tinged as always with a hint of impracticality and over-enthusiasm . For I can think of nothing better than knowing that our permanent stars have stories, as well. Someday, someday. I resign myself to either waiting and hoping, dropping out and not caring, or somehow helping it to happen.

So here I am. I am young still, and I have time. A new year has arrived, and I resolve to do something beyond sitting and waiting. I have no tolerance for lack of mindfulness, so let the good times roll in!