Eloquence

Being eloquent was never something I would have thought would be difficult. It's just like any other thing - if you want it enough it can happen, like learning to play the guitar or tame a lion. It's just effort and nothing more, nothing less. Natural talent is something that I've never actually believed existed; the world is a mixture of efforts with just a tiny smattering of aptitude.

But it's easy to be eloquent, and it's easy to not be eloquent. Oftentimes these two states of being are juxtaposed by the intentions, with your more severe efforts to be proper and smooth ending in the most utter failures. I would speak about the other direction, but that's not nearly as important in a society like ours. Someone trying to lack seriousness or poise or tact is generally not going to end up looking elegant by accident. I say generally, though, because I'm sure it's happened.

Eloquence is especially important in matters of courting, and it was never more important to me in one such situation. Her name doesn't particularly matter, but it was a strange one, so I might as well say it; she was Jewel. A suggestive name from proud parents, it seemed, and probably expressive of what most parents think of their new, pink, unblemished spawn. Fiery red hair also made the suggestion that her parents may have taken one glance at the newly birthed creature and thought "ruby."

Jewel was one of the most proper humans I have associated with in all my days. In all my four decades, I'd never before met a woman who had actually been to finishing school. From my cinematic experiences (I had worked in a drive-in theater in my youth, screening film after film for those who would watch, and those who didn't watch but showed up anyway), I had briefly been introduced to the concept by a dusty film featuring Ginger Rogers. Regardless, Jewel had a knack for always keeping her spine straight and her arms neatly at her sides as if balancing a fragile vase atop her head. When I approached her to ask for a date, elegance was an absolute necessity. I had saved my best denim jeans and button-up shirt for that day, even though the jeans were dusty and the shirt was wrinkled. I stood up as straight as my back would allow. Stammering and stumbling, I could feel my heart beating in the soles of my feet, my face heating up as I muttered the invitation. Hearing the answer was even more jarring than asking the question.

She and I dated for some time, but as anything, our interaction was fleeting. Whether by the choice of both those of a couple, a single one or the other, or neither, everything passes with time. Our love was not extinguished by either of our choice, the flame slowly deprived of oxygen until it could struggle no more. She was self-conscious about the wig she wore when we were wed, thought it didn't quite do her former fiery red hair justice. I agreed, but shared the sentiment that it was good enough as long as she was beneath it.

Seven months later, Jewel and I both knew time was short. She refused to rot in a hospital bed for any longer. She died in our bed on a Friday morning, a light rain pattering on the roof. It was seventy-two degrees on June 2, 1977. I was the only one there when she passed; we both told each other that our love was all we had, we weren't lying, aside from the usual and generally unimportant material things.

Life gives and it takes away. Of nothing else am I more certain.

New Reading Opportunities

Earlier this evening I decided to go book shopping, particularly for a novel that's been advertised in several forms to me, both as a personal recommendation and on favorites lists. It's by Miranda July and is called No One Belongs Here More Than You. From what I can gather from reading its back and what's been described to me, it's a gathering of stories that give a unique and refreshingly new take on the insignificant and the unexplored. Do I know what it's about? I haven't a clue - but I'm certain I'll enjoy it.

While I was at the bookstore, I figured I'd check on the book I had the store order some six weeks ago, and to my surprise they had received it and it was on the shelf for purchase. Hooray! This book is a collection of e-mails correspondences between an atheistic naturalist and a devout Christian historian. It's titled Is Believe in God Good, Bad, or Irrelevant? and features Preston Jones - the latter; a professor at John Brown University, a Christian school - and Greg Graffin - the former; lead singer of Bad Religion, holder of a PhD in evolutionary biology and committed scientist. I've gotten about a third of the way through it and the interactions between the two are as phenomenal as the topic at hand. Though occasionally they will be harsh about the others' beliefs, they never outright attack each other and are very cordial. In the first sixty pages both Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins are mentioned, though. In fact, during his PhD studies, Graffin managed to interview Mister Dawkins, a holder of a very similar evolutionary biology degree.

Anyhow, I'll be fantastically entertained in the next few days through my long evenings at work. It's really difficult to resist swapping between the books - perhaps I'll have to go through each concurrently.

What's Missing?

This is a question I ponder a lot, with varying degrees of satisfaction with said pondering and its conclusions. There are some events in life where change is an inexorable and unavoidable part of life. There are some concepts, people, places, and things in life that lead inevitably to a perceivable hole in one's psyche. It's similar to the feeling you experience when you fear or realize you've left something important at home while jet-setting on a vacation. That indescribable "something missing" conception.

It's peculiar in life that it's almost impossible to predict the exact size of the imprint these people, places and things have within our hearts and minds. Something you never thought you would miss looms large when it's gone - obviously it's not a foreign concept to us, with idioms like "you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone" being well known in our society. Sometimes the things you thought would never evaporate, things that you use as the foundation for building your skyscraper, are suddenly gone.

This blog allows me to explore feelings and concepts important to me, but the former has always been severely lacking. I've been wondering why more and more lately, why writer's block halts my ability to make regular posts when before I had no such difficulties. Have I lost my muse in the past few months?

I don't think so. I came to the conclusion that something is indeed missing, but it's not a person or place; it's the concept of conflict. Writing to oneself in a journal offers no exceptional conflict, no back-and-forth dialogue save whatever internal debates one can have. And maybe this is the heart of the problem - I find very little conflict in my life, and my inner thoughts have generally reflected this. I doubt myself far too rarely in my own head. Internal conflict, I will posit, is important - more than once I have created conflict where it does not actually exist to fulfill some kind of internal necessity. It's the same with people who are particularly judgmental of others, where the boundaries of "like" and "dislike" shift like oil in water. I have no problem with people like this, for the most part, save for my inability to understand the alienation they must feel by despising something one day and then loving it the next.

But I digress! Conflict should be more a natural part of life than something manufactured. I will strive to further challenge myself, my conceptions, and my senses. When someone says something I agree with, I will simply say so; there is little point in playing an advocate for a baseless devil.

Men Who Stare at Goats, The

So this is interesting. I was listening to a bit of Coast to Coast AM the other night and their guest was Stephen Root, best known for his portrayals of Milton in Office Space and Jimmy James on Newsradio. He mentioned a new project he was working on with the likes of Kevin Spacey and George Clooney called The Men Who Stare at Goats. Isn't that the best title ever?

Anyway, the film is based on a five-year-old book that delves into attempts by the United States military in waging psychological warfare. These range from the more-or-less conventional - such as playing loud music to disarm and "break" targets in hostage situations - to full-blown "psychic" operations. Interestingly enough, the latter wasn't always considered hokey and fake. The Soviet Union is especially well known for its psychic research during the Cold War, especially on topics like remote viewing, the gleaning of secrets by "seeing" objects or documents via extrasensory means.

Also of note is HAARP, the United States Air Force's High Frequency Active Aurora Research Station. The station is essentially a large Alaska transceiver that is used to research the ionosphere in various forms - measurements cannot be taken easily in the ionosphere, as the thickness of the air there is insufficient for a balloon, but the drag makes orbit at these altitudes impossible. The array can also generate frequencies falling into the VLF and ELF range by using a pseudo-transmission antennae created by the use of auroral electrojet. In observation of these frequencies, rumor has it that strange effects have been induced into subjects. Some posit that it could be possible to manipulate or disrupt certain human mental faculties (messing with emotions, fight or flight response, etc.) using ELF (sub 20Hz) broadcasts.

Regardless, all this remains pseudoscience for now - an interesting read at the most. Among all the forms of warfare and interrogation, psychological manipulation is one of the most frightening thanks to its ability to disrupt what we think and feel internally rather than being a secondary effect from some sort of physical torture. Though having psychokinetic powers like Sylar from the Heroes series would be pretty fun. And who knows what's to come in the future? Such things could certainly be replicated with some kind of chip implant that could read your mind coupled with some sort of magnetic field to manipulate objects with. Hell, I still think it's incredible that surgeons can wear gloves that control robots when operating:

In 2001, Doctor Jacques Marescaux performed a gallbladder operation on a patient over six thousand miles away via this type of telepresence. The technology, in the future, could perform surgeries unassisted by a human thanks to gobs of data gathered through thousands of operations. This could make previously costly surgeries plummet in price and make wait times virtually nonexistant. Oh, the future never looked so bright!

Schedule for Week Ending 5/10

Forgot all about doing the schedule post last week - oops! There wasn't a whole lot to say except I came and went when I felt like it, since there was really nothing to do (surprise surprise). Anyway:

Monday - 15:18 to 00:18 (9 hours)
Tuesday - OFF
Wednesday - 23:36 to 05:00 (14.4 hours)
Thursday - 00:00 to 04:00 (18.4 hours)
Friday - 00:00 to 04:00 (22.4 hours)
Saturday - 00:00 to 04:00 and 15:24 to 24:00 (35 hours)
Sunday - 00:00 to 04:00 and 15:30 to 24:00 (47.5 hours)

REVISED 5/06

Twelve, four, four, four, four, twelve, eight. Not so bad.

Nothing Better

Swinin' and Dinin'

Recently, the WHO upgraded the swine flu outbreak to a level 4 pandemic; this means that the disease has achieved sustained human-to-human transmission and is in the pre-pandemic stage. The particular strain of swine flu we're dealing with is a very new strain of the H1N1 virus - thus, very few people have immunity provided to them by the antibodies designed to fight off other strains.

It's theorized that the current strain is the result of a superinfection, a process by which cells are infected by multiple viral strains of influenza. The genetic mixing results in a virus that has the potential to spread between several different species, and has the added danger of being completely unrecognized by the antibodies developed to fight other types of flu. The strains recognized by (some of) our bodies include the H1N1 subtype that caused the 1918 pandemic, which is currently endemic in the population.

So what to do now? I'm certainly no expert when it comes to epidemiology or disease control, but there is no reason to panic. There's no reason to be unduly worried at this point; it's still early in the development cycle of the pandemic. In the coming weeks, one of several things could happen. The disease may not have the potential to spread effectively and efficiently between humans. If the rate of infection is less than one new host per host, the disease would die off fairly quickly. However, if this strain of H1N1 is able to spread effectively throughout the population, the World Health Organization will undoubtedly upgrade it to a level 5 pandemic; this is a sort of pre-pandemic level, an epidemic. Once epidemics begin to pop up across the globe, it's upgraded to a level 6, the highest designation with which to classify a disease.

Anyway, if you're running low on cough syrup or ibuprofen, it might be a good time to go pick some up. Honestly, though, I don't truly believe there's any cause to run out and empty the shelves of your local grocery store of canned goods and hoard bottled water. That time might come soon - full blown pandemics can necessitate governmental acts as serious as full blown quarantines, which can shut down entire towns and cities potentially. We're peering over the side of the cliff, and hopefully we won't lose our footing.