Perspective

I will spare you the morbid musings on how a year more in one's age is only a year closer to death, but I can't help but notice that other people think so too! There you go, I went ahead and validated my beliefs not through a logical proof but by relating to the masses - I am one step closer to feeling comfortable among my fellow beings. Regardless, I got a book for my birthday called Cosmos by Carl Sagan. It's sort of popular science with the cosmos and the planets, and the greeks, but very well written. Below is one of the passages that stuck, mainly because it says what i was thinking to the comma (only more articulate, mind you):

Part of the resistance to Darwin and Wallace derives from our difficulty in imagining the passage of millennia, much less the aeons. What does seventy million years mean to beings who live only one-millionth as long? We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.

Because in life,

let's be honest, you can't really have a nice warm/hot shower without receiving a very cold one afterwards (and vice-versa), here are some quotes.

This first one sent me cringing and nearly (NEARLY!) crying:

"... and go to Tiffany's. It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in their nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets. If I could find a real-life place that made me feel like Tiffany's then I'd buy some furniture and give the cat a name. I've thought maybe after the war ..."

But I was giggling ten pages later (I am reading "Breakfast at Tiffany's on my iPhone and the pages are small):

"She stooped toward O.J. Berman, who, like many short men in the presence of tall women, had an aspiring mist in his eye. "I'm Mag W-w-wildwood, from Wild-w-w-wood, Arkansas. That's hill country."

It seemed a dance, Berman performing some fancy footwork to prevent his rivals cutting in. He lost her to a quadrille of partners who gobbled up her stammered jokes like popcorn tossed to pigeons."

Ego

The Ego is a mental entity, a crude and ruthless ghost masquerading as our "self". It is a mental construct, produced by socialization, which rewards and punishes us with feelings of self-worth. The Ego lives by comparison. It identifies with events in our past and then compares our history to the histories of others. This comparison leaves us feeling better or worse than, but not equal to, others.

Quote

From Tracy from the new Black Diamond catalogue:

In this life, pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. [Dalai Lama]

The skies have won

From Explorer's Web tribute to Inaki Ochoa:

A realist, Inaki had little hope for the future of Mount Everest. "80 years from now Everest will be climbed by helicopters and cable cars," he said. "In the lift, you will hear somebody say, 'Hey, remember years ago all those dumb-asses getting themselves killed in avalanches and storms?' And people will agree, smiling and shaking their heads in disbelief. Fortunately I’ll be gone."

[...]

Yes Inaki was careful, but he was no coward. "Comfort, security and money are the three modern Gods of our western civilized society," he said. "Everything is ergonomic, insured, and aimed to take least possible physical effort. The value of whether a thing is good or bad is determined by how much money you can make out of it."

"Himalayan climbing is regarded useless and stupid, because you have to sweat to make your dreams come true and because you might die - as if you would live forever were you not a climber."

Geek humor

To fully appreciate this, you must know that Ruby, Python, Pearl and Smalltalk are programming languages.

"Once you have these classes, you'll typically want to create a number of instances of each. For the jukebox system containing a class called Song, you'd have separate instances for popular hits such as ``Ruby Tuesday,'' ``Enveloped in Python,'' ``String of Pearls,'' ``Small talk,'' and so on. The word object is used interchangeably with class instance." [Programming Ruby - The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide - D. Thomas et al.]

The sad part is that I actually laughed at this. I R rulz.

Inspired

I found this post here and i feel very very inspired by it. So here goes, I am going to do my one scary thing a day, following Eleanor Roosevelt's

"Do one thing every day that scares you."

And I am starting with .... Writing an email to "Adventure 21", a gear shop, to ask if they could sponsor me for Aconcagua. Gear will do, if no moneys are available. I am so scared of asking for something for meself and also so scared of talking to new people ...

Crows Are Not Black

The most amazing thing happened to me. I was just up on the school roof today to sip my coffee and clear my head. As I got there a crow was on one of the rails eating or clearing its beak of remains of what looked like bread breakfast. Anyhow, when I came up the bird flew up on an additional roof.

I didn't notice or hear it because I was listening to music, not until it flew from where it was back on the rail, very close to where I was standing. Then it started to yell at me, coming closer and closer. It got around one meter next to me, then decided that she/he was too close and flew back on the roof, over my head, really really close, with the wind it made disturbing my oh-so-tidy-not-really-having-a-bad-hair-day hair. It continued to yell from the roof, but then it flew back over my head, back and forth back and forth, five to six times, with the last time being uncomfortably close (have you watched Hitchcock's "birds"?). Then he landed behind me, eyeing my cup of coffee (it's green, maybe it was attractive) or maybe my head band (it's black, but i know that parrots for example have an affinity for hair accessories - see picture), then back on the rails. He kept cooing and telling me stuff, which of course I couldn't understand ... Back on the roof again, back and forth over my head, back and forth, one more time on the rails, and in the end he decided I wasn't worth it and flew away.

"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
[...]
Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore.
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door -
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door -
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
`Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,' I said, `art sure no craven.
Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the nightly shore -
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!'
Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.'"

Now my day can start.

Nobody cares

No one cares what I had for breakfast, I know!! That is why i won't tell you that I had this amazing mango* which i ate like a pig, peeling it with my fingers and not using a knife! There! now that i got that out of my system, let's proceed.

First of all, I must tell about my near-death experience a couple of days ago. I still sob inside when it comes to mind. So. I go up and create a project in Eclipse [just ignore until the capitals if you're not a geek] which i created out of the default workspace and into my research folder. A folder that contains all the documents that i ever ever created during these 2 years as a grad student. And I mean all of them, I wouldn't go so far as saying my life, but it's pretty close. And then i go ahead and delete the bloody project. And i change the default setting to "remove content from folder". And guess what? Swoosh!! IT'S ALL GONE! GONE! I was after the all night no sleeper, so I just started crying. It was the only thing I could think of!!! I recovered most of the data, thanks to the fact that I was writing on FAT32 (IC inspector was the best recovery software), but it required me to [grasp!!] boot into Windows, which I vowed myself never to do.

I resumed my stair climbing last night... Good thing I started two months before Aconcagua, because I really suck (again). I was expecting my breath to give up, but instead it was my feet that gave up first (different kind of leg muscles from running). I still owe myself 10 km before the weekend starts, which leaves us with today, I know. And on sunday my table says I have to run ... 13 k! Cool!!

*The anonymous writer of that comment probably knows that beside the healthy mango I also had two caramel candies [shhh!].

I leave you with a quote, for all you working people out there:

"For, let us make this quite clear, the "senhor" is not worth quite what it might at first seem to promise [...], for, in the varying ways this one short word is spoken, and according to rank or the mood of the moment, one can observe a whole range of modulations: condescension, irritation, irony, disdain, humility, flattery, a clear demonstration of the extent of the expressive potentiality of two brief vocal emissions which, at first glance, in that particular combination, appeared to be saying one thing. [...] The caressing, melodious tones of humility and flattery never sang in the ears of the clerk Senor Jose, these have never had a place in the chromatic scale of feelings normally shown to him."
Jose Saramago, All the Names

It's quote time!!!

I know i've promised silence until friday, but i'm supposed to return this tomorrow, so i'm adding in some quotes from "A Man Without a Country", K. Vonnegut

"Foreigners love us for our jazz. And they don't hate us for our purported liberty and justice for all. They hate us for our arrogance."

"[...] as a result of a shamelessly rigged election in Florida [...] we now present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jug-jawed, pitiless war-lovers with appallingly powerful weaponry - who stand unopposed. In case you haven't noticed, we are now as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis once were."

"There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and i don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president. This was true even in high school. Only clearly disturbed people wanted to be class president."

"True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country."

[wrt the president's state of the union]"what George Bernard Shaw said about this planet: [...] I don't know if there are men on the moon, but if there are, they must be using the earth as their lunatic asylum."

"I came to speak ill of Swedish engineering, and so diddled myself out of a Nobel Prize."

"We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap."

There are many more, the whole book should be quoted. Vonnegut is an amazing writer.

Shame

In an unphantomable exercise of democracy (unphantomable because DEMOCRACY does not happen in romania very often), last night an un-elected parliament (un-elected because when we vote for parliament we vote only for the political parties who can put any person in parliament) voted to suspend an elected president (for whom i voted btw). While I feel that it is good to have this as a display of democracy, i can't help to feel the injustice of it all. I feel neglected as a voter. It does not help that one of the members of parliament said and i quote "Mr. [enter president's name] has been threatening us with the electorate. Are you afraid of the electorate? What is the electorate?" [stupid f*k] So yeah...

I have finished reading "cat's cradle" and loved it all the way. What i loved most, besides it being exhilaratingly funny and TRUE, is the following idea: the people of San Lorenzo (island country in the middle of the Pacific) are very poor, their life expectancy being around 35 years. However, they are very very happy. Why? Because of a very important pact that their leaders (the political and the religious one) have done: you see, the political leader threw the religious leader and the religion he was preaching in disgrace, and any follower found practicing that religion is bound to suffer a gruesome death. The thing is, everybody (including the political leader) is a follower, and the religious leader is never ever caught, even though search parties are supposedly going out for him. So you see, the people are poor, and hungry, and full of diseases, but they are happy, because their lives are filled with excitement, because they feel that whatever it is they are doing is important (by the fact that it's illegal even though it's noble). There's more to it than what i just said, but i am not very good at reviews or story-telling for that matter. I put some quotes below.

"She hated people who talked too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind."

"This here is a re-search laboratory. Re-search means look again, don't it? Means that they're looking for something they found once and it got away somehow, and now they got to re-search for it?" (now THIS is personal)

"Hazel's obsession with hoosiers around the world was a textbook example of a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon. Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company [...] and any other nation, anytime, anywhere."

"The hand that stocks the drug stores rules the world. Let us start our Republic with a chain of drug stores, a chain of grocery stores, a chain of gas chambers, and a national game. After that, we can write our Constitution."

"I do no say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame, they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays."

"If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself."

A Man Without A Country

"Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you different."

"I am going to sue the Brown and Williamson Tobacco Company, manufactures for Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks! [...] And for many years now, right on the package, Brown and Williamson have promised to kill me. But I am now eighty - two. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon."

"[...] Do you know why I think George W. Bush is so pissed off at Arabs? They brought us algebra. Also the numbers we use, including a symbol for nothing, which Europeans had never had before."


Kurt Vonnegut

White man

"But the White man never guessed at what the Red man saw and heard and felt. The White man bought death and emptiness to this place. The White man cut down wise old trees with much to tell; young saplings with many life-times of life ahead; and the White man never asked, Will you be glad to make a lodgehouse for me and my tribe? Hack and cut and chop and burn, that was the White man's way. Take from the forest, take from the land, take from the river, but put nothing back. The white man killed animals he didn't need, animals that did him no harm; yet if a bear woke hungry in the winter and took so much as a single young pig, the White man hunted him down and killed him in revenge. He never felt the balance of the land at all.

No wonder the land hated the White man! No wonder all the natural things of the land rebelled against his step[...] White man joked that Reds could even track a man on water, they laughed as if it wasn't true. But it was true, for when a White man passed along a river or a lake, it bubbled and foamed and rippled for hours after he had passed."

Orson Scott Card, Red Prophet