Worlds Collide

Last week we had dinner with some newly-made friends and the subject of politics came up. We found out what each other's viewpoint was, and then when we realized that they were opposite of each other, we simply moved on to other topics and we continued to have a good time hanging out and talking.

I have some other friends that I also disagree with on politics, but I still enjoy discussing the subject with them because we can see each other's point of view and disagree without becoming disagreeable, and overall I think we both grow from discussing alternate view points.

I'm not bringing up this difference to say that one way is better than another. I don't need to discuss every subject with every friend that I have. It doesn't matter if it's because we wouldn't disagree in a friendly way or if it's just because we have different passions and the same subjects don't appeal to both my friend and me. My point in bringing this up is that I can choose what to talk about with my friends based on their interests, their passions, and the situation; not just based on my own passions and interests. I think that choice is a good thing.

That brings me to problem I've been feeling about my blog. My blog doesn't give me that same choice as a regular conversation does. My blog isn't individual. In my blog I don't just write to one person and so it's not custom-tailored to how I best communicate with anyone. My blog is written generally to everyone, whether I know them or not, whether they hate me or not. I'm writing simultaneously to my mom and my boss, to the kid that's hated me since the 5th grade and to the friend that lives too far away to in person very often, to my best friend and to the stranger that doesn't know me at all but hates me anyway. Not that those people necessarily read my blog, but they can read it just as easily as someone that I specifically target with any post that I write.

I realize that this is the nature of blogs and of the Internet in general, and for most of my blog's lifespan there's been no problem with that. The most that I've ever had to censor myself with it was to be sure that any references to my crushes were sufficiently disguised that I wouldn't cause myself any public embarrassment. Most of my posts are just silly and stupid, and the worst thing that can happen about someone unexpected reading them is that they won't think I'm as funny as I think I am.

Maybe my life is just different than it once was and that's why my blog has become different, too. If nothing else, my current crush is well-known and she's happy to have me publicly confess it. Maybe the only thing that's really changed is the frequency and passion in recent political discussions. Or maybe nothing's changed at all, and it's just the fact that I'm a multi-faceted person, and that sometimes I want to write about something that I feel more deeply than a burrito. (I mean that metaphorically. I feel burritos all of the way down.)

I think that if I were to have my way then I'd just write about everything that I think and feel, regardless of how personal or controversial or humorous the subject is or isn't. I'd just write open and honestly about myself and all of my facets and not worry about how my reader might judge me. Sometimes that's been fine for me, but I don't know if I'm brave enough to really open myself up to every person that might wander across my blog. I'm afraid of how I might limit my life by doing that. I've realized recently that I can't be open about every facet of myself with every person that I'm friends with. Some people simply aren't comfortable with all of my facets, and unfortunately relationships change or get ruined when they're forced to see me from a point of view that they hadn't previously.

So here I am, at the end of this post, not knowing what to do with my blog and my friends. It'd be nice if I could just separate my digital persona from my real-life image so that I could still use my blog as an outlet for all of my multi-faceted thoughts, or maybe I could separate all of my facets into separate identities and blogs that wouldn't have to collide or interfere with each other. (I could keep just my food-related blogs tied to my real identity, since anyone that looks at me will know that I like food.) I'm afraid it's probably too late for any kind of separation like that for the people that already know me and read my blog, and instead I just feel sad to feel that I've already ruined both my blog and some relationships.

Or maybe I should stop taking the oxycodone so that I can stop feeling so melodramatic about the whole stupid thing.

(I should probably point out that the oxycodone is a joke for the sake of anyone that might think that I'm addicted to painkillers, but the fact that I'd have to point that out just makes me feel like I'm talking in circles.)

The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius

I listened to the Forrest Gump soundtrack the other day and I've had the Age of Aquarius song stuck in my head. While I was trying to find a place to listen to the song today, I read a little bit about it. Apparently it's from some hippie musical called Hair, and then was later released as a pop song by the 5th Dimension. And, contrary to popular references (including my own three sentences ago) the song is just called "Aquarius", not "Age of Aquarius". Whatever, right?

Here's the interesting thing: Apparently there is some discord among astrologers about when the age of Aquarius really begins, but the first lines of the song lyrics give their own measurement for when it begins: "When the Moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars". According to Wikipedia this alignment will really happen on Feb. 14, 2009.

So, whatever the heck the age of Aquarius is, it starts on this week on Valentine's day. Weird, huh?

A Bad Week for Poetry

I'm not an expert on poetry or anything, but I do like poetry. I even took a poetry class in high school (that I've mostly forgotten). I just want it understood that I'm not a poetry-hater before I say what needs to be said.

About that poetry after Obama's speech on Tuesday: it sucked.

Ok, I don't really know if the poem itself sucked, because it was so boring that I have no idea what the heck the poem was even about. It might be a perfectly good and thought-provoking poem when read on paper. I don't really know. Either the poem sucked, or the delivery sucked, but something definitely sucked.

Wouldn't you be trying to get some kind of message across in a political poem? Well what good is your message if no one can stand listening to you read it? Did the author really need to give a two-second-long pause between every word of the poem? She should have just had Captain Kirk read it. At least his uncomfortably-long-pauses are spaced out enough to make it seem dramatic. Seriously, I couldn't even pay attention to her long enough to hear a whole sentence, let alone to understand what the poem was about. If they really needed that poem to be read after Obama's speech then they should have just typed it into a Speak & Spell and I think it'd be easier to understand.

Sorry about my last post. I've been informed that it doesn't make any sense. I still like it, though, so I'm not changing it. Instead, I'll just offer my apologies to anyone whose IQ was lowered because of reading it, and I'll try to give you a serious related post to try and make up some of those lost brain cells.

I'm not very far into Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time", but I have noticed something about the way he explains some of the more controversial scientific ideas (such as the big bang). He never insults or discredits religious ideas because of scientific discovery. He is especially courteous and careful about it, trying to be clear that science does not discredit religion, but just adds new understanding.

Take the following excerpt for instance. Hawking has just explained that we can observe that the universe is expanding. From that we know that the universe was once closer together than it is now, and from that we can deduce that there was once a time when the universe was "all at exactly the same place". Now the big bang (when the universe started expanding from being all in exactly the same place) is often treated as being at odds with the idea of divine creation, but Hawking doesn't explain it that way at all.

One could still imagine that God created the universe at the instant of the big bang, or even afterwards in just such a way as to make it look as though there had been a big bang, but it would be meaningless to suppose that it was created before the big bang. An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job!

I'm very impressed that Hawking doesn't try to say that the big bang discredits the creation, and even offers an explanation of how they can both be true.

One of the reasons that this is so thought-provoking to me is because I realize that the scientific community seems to be much more considerate of the religious community than we are of them. Hawking (himself an atheist) is very careful not to discredit the religious views of his readers, but it seems common to me that religious people are eager to discredit science as "just a theory" and to disbelieve the whole of scientific discovery rather than figure out how to reconcile their beliefs with the new knowledge that mankind is developing.

Science is bunk

I've started reading "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking. In the first chapter he describes the goals of science and scientific theory. Unfortunately, I think he's wrong about a crucial assumption. Here's (a misrepresentation of) an excerpt from the book:

The eventual goal of science is to provide a single theory that describes the [construction on I-80]. However, the approach most scientists actually follow is to separate the problem into two parts. First, there are the laws that tell us how [the construction on I-80] changes with time. (If we know what [I-80] is like at any one time, these physical laws tell us how it will look at any later time.) Second, there is the question of the initial state of [I-80]. Some people feel that science should be concerned only with the first part; they regard the question of the initial [creation of I-80] as a matter for metaphysics or religion. They would say that [the government], being omnipotent, could have started the [I-80] any way that [they] wanted. That may be so, but in that case [they] also could have made [the construction] develop in a completely arbitrary way. Yet it appears that [they] chose to make [the construction move along] in a very regular way according to certain laws. It therefore seems equally reasonable to suppose that there are also laws governing the initial state [of I-80].

See? Sure, he starts off reasonable enough, but did you see how he thinks that the construction moves along in some way that actually makes sense? Sorry, Stephen, but if the construction is really done "in a completely arbitrary way", then science can't hope to discover any laws to understand it nor to predict when (if ever) it will be completed.

Ok, maybe Stephen Hawking wasn't really talking about the construction on I-80, but if science can't even make sense of the construction, there's no way it can describe the whole universe.