Tag: thoughts

Thinking About Fermi

I’ve been thinking about the Fermi Paradox lately. Here’s the short version, if you didn’t click the link to do the background reading:

According to this line of thinking, the Earth should have already been colonized, or at least visited. But no convincing evidence of this exists. Furthermore, no confirmed signs of intelligence elsewhere have been spotted, either in our galaxy or the more than 80 billion other galaxies of the observable universe. Hence Fermi’s question, “Where is everybody?

There are a lot of possible answers to this question, some of which are more compelling to me than others. One possibility is that there’s nobody else out there, but that seems unlikely. Current evidence suggests that planets like our own are not rare; odds are good there are enough candidates out there for life.

Although it’s not the most logically compelling argument, I admit to liking the idea that we will be the first ones to the stars and that we’ll be the first to visit other worlds and other species. We haven’t heard from aliens because we’ll be the first to discover them.

A lot of speculation has been made about ancient astronauts visiting our world and guiding our technological development, but I’ve always found this idea somewhat disappointing; it strikes me as something of an insult to suggest that we couldn’t have figured out any of this shit without help from a higher power.

My admittedly flimsy justification for believing that humans might be the first intelligent species to arise in our galaxy comes from the apparent frequency of extinction events; we’ve had more than our fair share and if they’re common enough, they could explain why the clock has been reset on intelligence enough times such that nobody has beat us to the punch. Of course, that line of thinking falls into the same trap as all speculation of this sort does; we cannot assume that the conditions we experienced in our planetary history are common. We need a larger sample size before we can draw any kind of inference.

Anyway, it’s an interest thing to kick around for a while if you don’t have anything more pressing on your mind and you’re able to assess the question of “where are the aliens” in a reasonable, non-conspiratorial manner. Feel free to chime in with your thoughts; I’d love to have a discussion about this.

Thoughts On Walking

My grandfather used to take me  with him on his walks. He lived in a small town in upstate New York, which meant the kind of lace where everybody knew everybody, you could walk from one end of the town to the other and see the whole thing, and everything was very, very green.

There was also, apparently, a lot of things to see. Houses, mostly. At the time, I didn’t understand why this was interesting.

I regret that I wasn’t old enough to understand why these walks were enjoyable. For me, it was the offered bribe of ice cream that made the whole enterprise even remotely palatable. Even then, it was still frustrating. Grandpa liked to look at things. He liked to stop. He didn’t understand that the more time we spent looking, the less time there was for ice cream.

I think the problem is that I didn’t know how to drive yet.

Also, I was seven.

See, it’s my hypothesis that you have to drive for a few years before you can appreciate a good walk. When you drive, you can’t look at things. There’s just the road and all the people trying to kill you via their inattention. Maybe they’re trying to look at things or more likely, they’re looking at their laps and texting.

I came to this understand when I was driving home from work today. I took a different route than usual because I was picking up a suitcase for a friend. I drove through a part of Sahuarita that I’ve never been to before. The entire time I was driving, I was trying to navigate, but I felt frustrated, because I wanted to look out the window. I wanted to see what this part of the town looked like. I wanted to let my mind wander in the semi-intrusive way that it does as I wonder what the lives are like for the people who live in these houses.

What does it feel like to live here? Do they like it? Is there a barking dog that annoys them? Are the trees nice and shady? Would I like it if I lived here? Who would I be if I lived here instead of living where I do now?

You can’t do that when you’re driving. Hence why I like to walk now. I walk every day on my lunch break; it’s a habit I started when I transferred down to Sahuarita and it’s one I’ve kept to almost every single day even though the summer heat has verged on “skull-crushingly brutal.” Despite it, I still walk. I look around. I think. My mind wanders in a way that would be negligently fatal in a car.

It’s unfortunate my grandfather isn’t around anymore. I think I’d enjoy those walks a lot more now. We could wander. We could stop. We could look at things together.

That’d be nice, I think.

Thoughts On Death

(Author’s Note: I originally meant to write about my reaction to an article I read about medically assisted suicide, but it became a personal reflection on death and dying instead. I’m going to post it anyway despite the intimate nature of these thoughts. I hope that you will consider them with respect. Thank you.)

We don’t talk about death. That’s the rule.

It’s not just an unwritten rule, either; it’s illegal to want to die in almost every state except for four. Unless you live in Oregon, Washington, Vermont or Montana, you are not allowed to ask for help to end your life, no matter how ravaged you are due to disease, no matter how much dignity you’ve lost, no matter how onerous life has become, you have to tough it out to the bitter end.

And to that I ask: why?

No, that’s not right. I know why.

Part of it is because of the pervasive and poorly-defined concept of “the sanctity of life,” which is a somewhat ironic condemnation when it’s coming from a vegetarian. In fact, I support the sanctity of death because of my respect and love for life. The sanctity of death is necessary for there to be any such thing as a sanctity of life. The word sanctity is used without understanding what it’s supposed to mean. People think it means being alive is more important than everything else, but that’s not correct. Is being alive more important than living with dignity? Is being alive more important than being without agony?

Regardless, we don’t talk about death even though it’s the one thing that we all have in common. It’s our common bond and our equalizer: kings and beggars both die. Men and women of every race, every creed, every class, every corner of the world. We all die.

Everything dies. Even the planets, stars, and galaxies die. Reality itself will likely die someday due to entropy. We’re all in this together. Nobody’s getting out alive.

Why are we afraid of that? Why don’t we talk about the most common element of our shared humanity? We celebrate life in all its forms, save for the one aspect that gives life its greatest meaning. We plan weddings, graduations, the births of children, and all of life’s other many milestones, but when it comes time for the grand finale, how many of us think about it? Ever? Instead, we let others plan it for us and define a moment that should be ours, assuming there’s even somebody around at that point to pay attention. Not everybody has even that much.

It’s not a question of wanting to die; I don’t really want to, but wanting isn’t really the point. It’s about accepting that I will and you will and we all will.

It’s about having a healthy respect for life.

And to me, stretching life out long past the breaking point isn’t about respecting it at all. It’s the same as the author who pushes out repetitive novels of earlier and better works or the movie franchise that had too many sequels or whatever other creative thing you enjoyed until its creator squeezed it too tightly, trying too fervently to get every last drop out of it rather than letting go and moving on.

The best stories are the one that end when it’s their time to end.

The saddest stories are the ones that are forgotten because they hung around far past the point of anybody caring because they weren’t allowed to end.

So, here’s me, right now in a point in time and space, thinking about the future. Thinking about the end and how I want it written.

Here’s how I want my story to end. I might not get this ending; every writer knows that sometimes your characters throw you for a loop or the story takes an unexpected twist. But assuming it all turns out as planned, this is the way my story ends.

I want to be at home.

One of my greatest fears is dying in a hospital. I don’t like hospitals; they’re cold and mechanical places. I feel terrible every time I walk past the open door of an occupied room in a hospital, because I imagine myself lying in that bed, looking out at the people walking past the door and knowing that they don’t know me and they don’t care that I’m dying. Hospitals are very lonely places, no matter who you’re with. I don’t want to die in a lonely place.

I want my final moments to be experienced in my favorite place: my place. I want to see my pictures and my books and whatever technology I have and whatever pets I have. I want my family to be there if they can, but I don’t want them to feel the need to keep a vigil over me for fear that I might die alone. So long as I’m in my space, no matter where that space is, as long as it’s home, I won’t be alone.

This is why I support the right to die.

I should be allowed to decide these things. I should be allowed to experience my last moment with dignity. It may be that this never happens: my death may be sudden or it may be an unexpected accident or it may be that I never experience the slow, wasting away due to disease and this right is unnecessary.

But if it does end with me in a ravaged state, I want to know that my life and my story end with the respect that I, and every other person who ever has lived, ever does live, and ever will live deserve.

Because to ignore it and pretend that it won’t happen isn’t just irresponsible. It isn’t just magical thinking. It means we forget, or worse, ignore the needs of those who are dying for fear that they might remind us of our own deaths. Some people might say there’s nothing worse than death. I can think of many things that are worse than death.

Being forgotten in your life’s final moments is worse than death.

Being ignored in your life’s final moments is worse than death.

Dying in agony is worse than death.

Dying without dignity is worse than death.

There are many things that are worse than death and we perpetuate them every time we shun the dying to a corner and turn our eyes away.

This is why we should talk about death.

Thoughts On “Star Trek Into Darkness”

It took a bit of doing after finding out that my favorite theater was closed, but we did manage to attend a showing of Star Trek Into Darkness last night. The problem was finding a showing that was “just right” and gave us enough time to get there but not so much time we’d be walking out of the theater at 2:00am on a work night. The answer turned out to be a 9:00pm show at the El Con theater which is clear across town from me, but whatever.

Harkins Theater, I miss you already.

Anyway, let’s talk about the movie. In fact, let’s talk about the movie after a page break, because there are going to be los spoilitos in this post. That’s Spanish for the spoilers, fyi.

Continue reading “Thoughts On “Star Trek Into Darkness”” →

Random Thoughts On Incense

You might be expecting a post laden with euphemism or thinly veiled drug references. This is not that post. Any post I could possibly write about drugs would be very short, unless I was able to draw from my extensive knowledge gleaned from marathons of Breaking Bad on Netflix and Requiem for a Dream.

No, instead, I’m thinking about actual incense.

Somehow, I managed to acquire a box of “Dragon’s Blood” incense sticks. Most likely, somebody left them in my apartment. I certainly didn’t buy them and weird shit appears all the time around here. For instance, I have a box of sparklers whose origin is dubious. I’ve been tempted to light one of the sparklers, but I can imagine all the ways that might end in horror, tragedy, and comedy, depending on whose face gets immolated and whose doesn’t.

Without further preamble, here are my random thoughts about the incense stick that is cheerfully smoking away on the desk beside me:

  • I had a roommate that used to burn a lot of incense because he smoked a tremendous amount of marijuana. This was one of my most poignant incense memories. In fact, he convinced me that everybody bought incense solely for this purpose.
  • My mom burned a lot of incense when she had her apartment. She does not smoke weed (as far as I know). There’s a funny story, though, about her neighbor who did assume the pot smoking, because of the previously mentioned usage rule.
  • I like watching the smoke drift around the room because it’s a pure writer trope to smoke and write. The problem is that I really like my lungs and don’t want to start smoking, but I’m also heavily influenced by media and pop culture depictions of writing.
  • I wonder how bad all this incense smoke is for my lungs. It can’t be good for my lungs. Smoke is smoke, right?
  • Why did they decide to call this particular scent “Dragon’s Blood?” It smells more herbal than sanguinary or reptilian, in my opinion. In my mind, real dragon’s blood would smell more coppery.
  • Even though it’s all emotionally cleansing and such, I’m sure this is not healthy. I should Google this. I’m going to Google this.
  • Yup, turns out that burning incense, as well as candles, “can be a significant source of indoor air pollution, including combustion products from candles, which can emit varying amounts of soot and pollutants.” So that’s  good news. I feel very relaxed now that I know this.

That’s all I’ve got tonight. Sorry. I’ll try to have something more substantial for my post tomorrow. Maybe something about the political spectrum, maybe.

Romanticism vs. Enlightenment

As you might infer from the title (you clever reader, you), lately I’ve been preoccupied with the concept of dueling themes. It seems like duality has been a feature of human thought forever. Light vs. dark, good vs. evil, etc. are common enough and certainly universal, but what about the more abstract oppositions? Thought vs. feeling, red vs. blue, law vs. chaos, and other less clear-cut themes are interesting to me because there is not obvious “right” answer. Good vs. evil is banal in the sense that no sane person truly believes that he or she is evil. A person who commits evil is usually certain of their own moral reasons for having done so, no matter how misguided. That, or they’re crazy.

Romanticism vs. Enlightenment is something that’s been on my mind ever since reading through that linked TV tropes page. I also read a post by David Brin that thoroughly denounces the fantasy genre, long a bastion of Romanticism, as “pining for Feudalism.” It all got me thinking and since I do my best thinking at a keyboard, here we are now.

Romanticism is one of those things that writers seem drawn to almost instinctively (unless you’re a science fiction writer). It just seems natural to want to be in the company of Poe, Shelley, Lord Byron, and countless others. All the talk about creativity just seems to fall right in line with the writer’s mindset. On the surface, I’d say I considered myself a Romanticist.

And I really, really like the aesthetic. I like the fantasy genre. I like swords and spells and dragons. I feel much more affinity for those tropes than any other. If such an opposition could be boiled down to two icons, it would be this: Star Wars (Romanticism) or Star Trek (Enlightenment)? I’m in the Star Wars camp.

Here’s the thing: I feel weird for choosing that side. When I think about my ideas and my world views, everything seems to push towards the Enlightenment side of the equation. A co-worker of mine, when posed this question today, said that she preferred the Enlightenment because she “views everything through the lens of feminism” and I found myself agreeing with her; it’s hard to embody feminism (or even the broader definition of humanism) without appealing to Enlightenment ideals.

So, which is it? Romanticism or Enlightenment? Perhaps it’s a foolish question, since a person is too complex to be boiled down to labels and broad definitions, but it seems that with enough consideration of the details, a general trend should emerge. It should be possible to identify one’s self as “leaning towards one” through an overall preference of one set of ideals, even if one does not enjoin all of them. And if these opposing themes are truly in opposition, it doesn’t seem feasible to say that one is “both.” At some point, a definition has to be made.

I do have a reason for why I ponder these things, unrelated as they might be to my larger existence. You know what they say about an examined life, yes? This is me examining my life and myself which should be an unsurprising endeavor for an introvert. I like to think that it’s possible to remove various mental contradictions and incongruousness from myself through the process of self-reflection. Perhaps this is to prevent hypocrisy of thought (a vegetarian who supports the death penalty? Wtf?) or perhaps it’s an attempt to live up to the skeptical ideal.

Maybe I’m over thinking it. All I know is that this is what’s going through my head at the moment.