Trust the Ferret, the Ferret is Wise

Hey. Yeah, it's been a while. Bit of dust on this old place. Well, old in internet age, this LJ'll be five and a half in... Huh. The archive says the first post was in May, 2004, but I KNOW there were earlier ones, saying stuff like "This is just here for me to watch other people's LJs" and we know how that turned out. So, about five and a half years, we'll say. It's close enough. But that's just a number, not really a milestone. I'll get to those in a minute.

First though, I wanted to apologize to people, for not being around much, and not being around or talking to people much for the last while. Maybe a year. Part of the blame I can place easily on being busy, what with everything that's gone on. I'm back in school studying engineering, for about another year after this semester. I moved hundreds of miles, got a new job, got an apartment, got married, etc. So, a lot going on, and intermittent net access through it all. And I've barely mentioned most of that here. Which is what I feel a little weird about. I haven't mentioned much of that here at all, or anywhere, really. Haven't been able to be online and talk with people as much as I used to. That and I don't often talk about myself (which is why I've had a blog for five years, uh huh.) But I wanted to apologize to everybody for not being around, though I don't know how much that's going to change, 'cause I'm still busy.

Two of those reasons I'm busy are the milestones I mentioned in the title. The first? Last Monday, I turned 30. Which on the one hand is just a number, and doesn't seem very important, but on the other hand is made into this big huge thing culturally. And the other thing is we're buying a house. Despite these, I don't really feel like a responsible adult though. And I'm back in school, but there's far worse places to be, and I'm lucky I landed my internship when I did, and have been able to keep it. But I still find myself thinking things like "I wanna be a Science Hero when I grow up!" Or, in other words, this XKCD. Though I haven't made lego buildings in a while. My legos are in Virginia.

So what's the plan? Get moved, and finish school, and the rest I'lm taking by ear right now. Gonna have to start looking at finding jobs and taking the FE exam and that sort of thing soon, but not yet. Responsible Adultness? Well, gonna have to keep faking it. And try and get out more, instead of just letting responsibilities become excuses not to do the rest of the stuff I need to do. Cut back on the empty calories of flash game distractions and spend more time catching up with people I know. Send letters, the actual physical kind, 'cause it's really cool to get stuff besides bills and spam in the mail. Just need to figure out how to make the time, I've got two half-finished letters that've been sitting around for months.

Why is that many of the people who talk the loudest and the longest about "bravery" and "toughness" and so on were the first people to completely panic about terrorists and demand, say, pointless and intrusive searches, wars with unrelated countries, and generally bombing the crap out of other people, just so they can feel safer from the Magical Supervillain Terrorists?

(And yes, I know several possible answers. I'm mostly being rhetorical here)

For all the glories and conveniences civilization brings people, there's one problem with it.

It's BORING. All of the little, necessary work to keep things running? Not exciting. It's papers and numbers and routine maintenance and zoning laws and public meetings and procedures and plenty of non-exciting minuate. It's all the little things that need to be done and done right and when they're all done, then you've got the giant pretty skyscraper. Now you just need people to clean it.

Excitement is what happens when things go wrong.

In a lot of RPGs, WoW for instance, when you throw something away, it disappears from your inventory and the world, for good.

It's not like that in the real world. We're all here on the bottom of this thin ocean of air surrounding a ball of molten rock. You're breathing the same oxygen the dinosaurs did. The carbon in that burger you ate could be the same as Abe Lincoln ate.

So what happens when you throw something away? Most of the time, it gets driven off to somewhere, and then tossed on a pile with a lot of other things people didn't want or need any more. Eventually, it all gets covered with plastic and buried under dirt. It's still there. It doesn't disappear.

The Earth is largely a closed system. There is no "away" where we can just throw things and forget about them. Solid, liquid, or gas, it's still gonna be here with us.

I think one of the traits that helps define me is I think things can be better. Our best days don't have to be behind us, they're ahead of us. Not just individually, but as a world. Instead of looking back to the idealized past, and seeing how things have just been downhill since whatever perfect Golden Age, the Golden Age is an idea, for the future. Something to work toward.

Improvement is possible. I don't know about human perfectibility, but we can certainly be better people. Most of civilization may still be a thin veneer over the caveman mind we evolved with, which lies atop the monkey mind, which lies atop the lizard mind, but that doesn't mean we can't try to be better. And actually be better. And then our kids can be better, and their kids better, and so on. People will still fundamentally be people, but maybe we can all just be a little bit better.

Hmm. It's that time of year almost, isn't it?

I have no idea what to write. Maybe a mystery. Or something pulp. Or a near-future sci-fi thing. Or something with giant monsters. I could do a real honest-to-goodness superhero story. Or I could write a Deep Meaningful Piece of Real Literature.

My brain's in a weird place this morning. Probably because I stayed up too late and then was reading The Invisibles this morning. So, a random question.

If everybody chose on their own to do exactly what they were fated to do, would that be destiny or free will?

Recently, reading a couple blogs, I came up with a completely non-moral, non-religious, non-soft-hearted-liberal, etc reason to try and do away with poverty. It's inefficient. Wasteful. Not just of human lives, but of potential. Imagine all the inventions and businesses that could be started, if people weren't in the deathly grip of poverty, or weren't scared that if they failed they'd lose everything. If there were some reasonable minimum level of security, people would be more free to try something new, get out of the dead end jobs, etc. And then maybe we could get society as a whole out of this position where the most common jobs are dead-end jobs, mostly selling crap we don't need to each other.

But think about it. Think about all the things that people could do if they weren't trapped in their situations by crushing poverty. Think of the things people could do if they weren't trapped and clinging as tight as they can to the crappy place they are now for fear of that crushing grip of poverty. Think of the chances people'd be willing to take if there was something there to catch on besides the hard streets. And then think of what all that could do for the country, hell, the world.

Of course, the problem with presenting this as a practical solution to certain kinds of folks is they don't want people to try, to dare, they'd rather have people scared and dumb, it's easier to get money out of them, and easier to give them somebody else to blame and get their votes. There's quite a few people who use talk about things like economics and stuff only so long as they help them get the answers they want.

But there you go, a completely non-squishy reason to try and end poverty, that doesn't require any concern for your fellow man, just consideration of what that kind of society could do for you.

The moral or ethical or religious or similar reasons are perfectly good too, and general concern for your fellow man should be enough reason on its own. And the people it's not good enough for probably won't be convinced by this either, but this is just yet reason to add on there.

Don't read about superhero comics on Wikipedia. Not because it's biased, but because reading the summaries of the stories will make you realize how absolutely stupid many of them are.

I should be working on Physics, or finding everything for my tax return, but instead, I'm blogging.

So I'm looking for a job, because my current job frankly sucks. It's boring, the pay isn't very good, and there's little worthwhile about it. But while doing so today, I realized something. I couldn't see doing any of the jobs listed there as a Career. Some could be interesting for a while, but not forever. There's few jobs I can see doing forever, they'd get boring. Unless it's a job that involves doing new things on a regular basis, or doing lots of different things, like space explorer or adventurer or something. Or some kind of scientist/rock star, like Buckaroo Banzai or Pardis Sabeti. (Seriously. She's a genetic researcher, and has a band and was interviewed in the latest issue of Seed.)

The real challenge there is how to figure out how to go from underemployed retailferret to scientist/rock star/space adventurer. I don't quite think that classified ad looking for a cow-tipper's gonna do it, but you never know.

I bet a cool hat would help.