Author: Ming

At the age of 46, I suffered a stroke and am doing my best to recover and put that behind me. My brain works differently now, which I recognize due to my former profession as a programmer. Though I do not FEEL different, I recognize that I AM different with different behaviors than before. This makes me very strange. And I was already very strange before this consciousness-altering event. So who am I now? I can still write, so sometimes, I think I'll do that.

Prologue

Excerpts from Excommunicated Grand Bishop Philosopher Jayden Stein-Tsao year STWG12, the second year of his captivity

Human governments are incapable of relinquishing power to a new system of government because of corruption and self-interest. All revolutions promise change and a better life for the common man. But few deliver results. In the interim chaos of the revolutionary fight, an authoritarian military government takes control by necessity. If the rebels win, the human leaders who sacrificed and achieved victory are reluctant to give up the power they earned to the masses who hid in their homes and cowered. Most revolutions end this way and result in authoritarian regimes, regardless of what their initial ideals and goals were. The common people are the foot soldiers for change and hope. They believe that any change must be better than the tyranny they already suffer. History proves that the common people are fools and are almost always wrong. Tyranny finds its way of becoming worse more often than not. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, North Korea, Khmer Rouge. All good intentions. All bad outcomes for the common people.

In the very few rare cases in which the leaders are generous enough to relinquish power to the people, a democracy can flourish and usher in a new age. However, over long period time, the natural corruption and self-interest of people who have consolidated power can erode the safeguards against tyranny established by the democracy’s founders. A powerful interest group, whether the church or the military or industry, will form an alliance with the government against the people to control and exploit the people.

When writing the constitution for a new nation, you can ban an alliance between the church and state, the military and state, and industry and state. Regardless of the ban, an alliance will inevitably be made. For the state is made of people, and you cannot ban people from the government when democracy guarantees that governance comes from the people. And the military and the church and industry are all just people, after all, and thus cannot be banned either.

If any one of the three great powers of a nation, the church, the military or industry, should gain an alliance with the state, it will soon absorb the other two great powers into its being. Compared to the great struggle of overcoming the state, absorbing the other two great powers will be easy and be achieved so quickly that there is be no time for the people to react by passing laws against such an unholy trinity with the state. All human empires begin this way and end with the common people being trampled by the powerful.

And so, it is no different with us common people today, here in the once great United States of America, in the year 12 of our great Lord Starbucks-Time-Warner-Google, hallowed by thy name. And here I am imprisoned for the second year, for blasphemy, though I only speak of the truth of the origin of our Lord Starbucks-Time-Warner-Google.

Amen.

On the Nature of Freedom

FREEDOM!! We all want it… whatever it is. People in movies will die for it. So it must be pretty good. No one dies for CARAMEL ICE CREAM, though maybe they should.

I scream for ice cream, but maybe it’s not worth dying for.

But freedom is.

Why?

Have you wondered what freedom is? Well, I have thought about it a little bit after being a nomad. Nomading around means finding a new place to stay every night. Every night, I have to make a decision. I have to make a choice. What are the risks staying here? How much will it cost me to move from here to where I want to go tomorrow? Will I need to visit my storage area, PO box, my friends, or a gym where I can take a shower? Is it legal to stay here? Will the police knock on my van? Will taggers graffiti up the van while I’m asleep?

I weigh up the pros and cons and make a decision about where to stay… mostly a different place every night. Those of you who stay in the same place every night don’t have to make this decision. Those of you who have a mortgage or rent have made a decision to remove this choice from your every day life. For you non-nomads, this one long-term decision to rent or buy a house is safe and free of consequences. There are no variables in cost, safety, access to wifi or showers, or many numerous considerations that you wouldn’t want to be bothered with.

But there is a subtle difference of thinking when you do this. When I make a choice, I’m aware of the consequences. I’m aware of when I’m in a high crime area. I’m aware of when I’ve commuted kinda far from my friends. I’m aware of many kinds of risks of having my entire home with me and possibly losing it at any time to an accident or to crime. I’ve already damaged the van a few times in my travels, but I accept that is a consequence and cost to this kind of lifestyle. I accept the consequences because I made a conscious choice which weighed those risks.

I find this in contrast to my pre-nomadic lifestyle which removed choice and decision from my life so that I could follow a pattern. A lot of self-help books and blogs write about success. And a lot of those writings suggest following a routine in order to be more efficient. Einstein and Steve Jobs famously had a closet full of the same shirt so that they wouldn’t have to think about what to wear each day. Removing this decision, this choice, allowed a little more time each day for their other activities. Every day they wear the same shirt, they have made an unconscious choice to do so. It’s still a choice. They can still choose a different shirt on any day. But mostly, they don’t because they no longer consider it a choice that can be made.

But how many of you would go as far as to have only one outfit? How many of you enjoy the small choice of something different to wear each day. How many of you enjoy eliciting compliments or showing off your personal style? That small amount of choice is freedom. And what that freedom grants us is a little bit of joy. A little bit of human connection every day. Relinquishing that freedom and sending it into the unconscious means you’re giving up on a small amount of joy in order to be efficient!

Now, what I’ve discovered after nomading around is that I had to stop many patterns of living a typical silicon valley lifestyle that had taken away the joy that I never knew existed underneath! Today, I feel more connected, present, and aware. I have far fewer patterns and thus am far less robotic. And less robotic means more human.

Freedom. It’s worth dying for because it is the same as choice. And choice is the same as joy and happiness.

But you don’t have to die for it. We all are privileged enough to live in a time and place that has an enormous capacity for personal freedom. But we constrain ourselves from ever coming close to realizing the potential freedom that our lives grant us. We are constrained by our own patterns in order to make our lives efficient and regimented and structured and safe.

But I challenge you to break those patterns every so often. Try the opposite of all of the above: Less efficient, less regimented, less structured, less safe. Going on vacation is a good break in the pattern. Make conscious choices about things that have seemingly already been decided. If you find yourself saying, “I keep doing this, but I’m not even sure I like it,” then stop. I found that was easy with video games. They have an addictive nature. But once I stopped, I didn’t feel the need to start again.

Ask yourself what percentage of your life could be reproduced by a computer program? Are you that consistent that you are running a loop that is the same from day to day? If the percentage of routine is how much of a robot you are, then the remaining percentage of non-routine is how human you are. Now, there is a purpose to the robotic regimented side of us, which is to buy more time for us when we are doing the human things in life. But, it’s easy for us to get carried away and take too much joy away from our day-to-day lives by regimenting it so strictly.

Einstein and Steve Jobs were each free to choose not to wear that same shirt on each day. Mostly, they chose not to exercise that particular freedom. What particular freedom are you choosing not to exercise today?

 

The Divorce Post

We’re getting a divorce!

We’re getting a puppy!

Both those statements are lies. That last statement is a lie. I’m not getting a puppy. Some people may have figured something was up from other clues. If not, then the final clues above should answer your curiosity.

It’s bad grammar to say we’re getting a divorce. The correct thing to say is that we’re getting divorced. Just like you’re supposed to say “I have been graduated from college” rather than “I have graduated from college.” Language. It’s funny sometimes.

Even saying “we’re getting divorced” seems wrong somehow. There are quite a few connotations in “getting divorced” that don’t really apply to my relationship with Jennifer. I think it’s because we’re tied up with what marriage means and what it’s supposed to mean to a couple that we gain all of this negative baggage about what divorce means to those people. People have developed a fairy-tale notion of what a marriage should be and define success by those impossible terms: Living happily ever after, forever and ever, and Twuewove.

But we’re adults here, and we should have a more reasonable, less naive definition of a successful marriage. Were the people in the marriage happy? For the majority of the time, yes. Did the people in the marriage grow and learn from each other? Very much so. Are the people in the marriage stronger as individuals than before? Yes, certainly. Did the people in the marriage respect each other during and after the marriage? Yes, absolutely. So, by that criteria, I would say it was a successful marriage.

And since each of us can now move on and accomplish other things in our lives independently of each other, I would say it was a successful divorce, too.

Do you know how spiral galaxies form? When two normal, smooth elliptical galaxies collide, their gravities tug and pull at each other as they spin towards each other, pulling their stars into a spiral pattern. While the colliding galaxies are together, astronomers used to mistakenly categorize them as single irregular galaxies rather than two colliding galaxies. Without seeing the motion of the galaxies over a long period of time, it’s hard to distinguish two galaxies from one weird mass of stars.

After coming together and orbiting each other for some amount of time, the cores of the two galaxies inevitably hurtle away from each other, tugging along whatever stars had fallen into their influence. Their destinies were intertwined together in a brief eon which spun their substance into the spirals that we see in the sky. Although their cores remain mostly the same, and moving with the same momentum as before the collision, each galaxy has gained some stars and substance from the other before departing. The new stars and new spiral structure will remain with each from then on. And astronomers may look at the sky and see two distinct, beautiful spiral galaxies each going their own way in the universe.

If you are lucky, you can look up at the sky and see an irregular galaxy getting successfully divorced and becoming two spiral galaxies. The universe is not static, despite Einstein’s cosmological constant. To expect anything that complex to remain the same over any period of time would just be childish fairy-tale wishful thinking.

Even so, twuewove…

 Goodbye galaxy NGC5427! A part of you will always be with me! Literally.