May 28

I keep on feeling these swings between "I haven't actually got that much, it'll be fine!" and "oh no, everything is due and there's no possible way it can all get done."  At this point, I have no idea what's accurate.  There's a lot due.  I'm not sure how much of it I can do in how much time.  I hardly even know how much time I have.  This is the downfall of living one day at a time.  I'm constantly surprised by things that are happening tomorrow, for example: as I write this, I was reminded that we have the second part of a bio exam tomorrow.  I have not prepared at all, the last class was spent on new material, and the style of learning for this unit runs exactly opposite to my strengths.  So that'll be a large proportion of my night, after I get home at 6:30.  That's often the toughest thing, especially now:  having to work around a job, as well as training that has completely fallen to the wayside as school arbitrarily decides that it is the only thing that matters in the world right now.  It's kind of crazy.  Tonight's plan of action:  Work until 6:30, get home, eat supper, study for bio, write a biology for band, of all things, write a letter to my coach explaining that I can't volunteer for them next weekend because I have to do so much work for other things.  Anyway, I'm off to do some of those things!

May 22

Challenges

I've always been one for a challenge.  So, when we were given our assignment sheet for a final essay in Global Issues, I knew pretty shortly what I would have to do. On it were a list of assertions to respond to.  They were phrased and made in a way that suggested that this should be a response in the affirmative. But that's not what I've learned, not in this course or in this school system.  I was questioning these assertions.  And while struggling to decide amongst the vague, progressive ideas listed, I decided that I had to respond in the negative to these.  I would pick a topic that I could assert was not as it was shown, and do it convincingly.  Oh, the potential was there for a firestorm.  "Indigenous Peoples can teach us about how to live sustainably."  I was tempted.  But I also didn't want to leave the school on a note quite that controversial. So I'll be writing an essay about how we do not "all belong to the human species, our concerns are interdependent, and we are part of the natural world."  This might be a challenge in areas.  It might be a success.  But it's something I'm excited about, which in school for me these days is an accomplishment already.  It's going to be an adventure.  And I like those.

May 19

I finished Cloud Atlas this morning.  It was a pretty enthralling read for the second half.  That said, I have never seen a book so slow to warm up. The first section was some of the most boring, slow, and un-developing reading I've done in a long time.  The second section was only marginally better, because at least the characters were different from one another. But when I finally pushed through, and the first Luisa Rey mystery started to heat up, I was hooked.  Reading went from a chore, to an addiction.  I would stay up late at night reading through Sonmi's orison,  in particular.  That section made the book for me.  It represented a better dystopia than 1984, masterfully realistic and fact-based.  It was fascinating, afterwards, to see the foreshadowing to this dystopia, in sections where, for example, Luisa's mother tries to set her up with a man whose views are identical to those of the future corpocratic society.
Overall, the novel is about freedom and power, racism and discrimination.  The Moroiroi and slavery in The Pacific Journal.  Society and one's own need for creativity and independance, in Letters from Zedelgheim. In Luisa Ray, it's about freedom from ideas and oppression.  In Timothy Cavendish, the story focuses on freedom from society's expectations, and is a little bit more literal, like The Pacific Journal.  But for the literal discussion of freedom, it's really all about Somni-451. This section looks at a nightmarish free-market scenario, where genetic modification has made, instead of a GM superior master race ruling over the un-modified, but an inferior race, modified to be the new slave labour.  This is an interesting reversal of the common theoretical future. The whole second half of the book is  Then, in the conclusion,  after being imprisoned by a greedy shipmate, Adam Ewing finishes the book with a manifesto about equality, and fighting for what you believe is right.  As the first chronological character.  I'll let you think on the implications of that.

May 13

Technology is cool.  Really cool.  Right now, I'm watching a live stream of a screen in a room in Russia, where in about an hour, a spacecraft will land. With people on it who have been up for months. The more you think about that, the more mind boggling it is.  They've been around the globe, in space, thousands of times.  In a habitat built by a multitude of nations, that is hundreds of meters long.  It's surreal to think about. Up on the screen pops a man floating inside the space station. That's coming live from hundreds of kilometers over the earth.  It's hard to believe. And some don't.  But the amount of footage, science, and facts we have from inner and outer space is amazing.
Now they're speaking with crews on the ground, while moving hundreds of meters per second, through the atmosphere.  They'll stay in semi-constant contact with crews until they hit the ground at 7.3 meters per second, somewhere in central Kazakhstan. In seconds, several circling helicopters will arrive and pick them up, placing them on stretchers: They haven't experienced gravity in months.  They will be unable to walk unassisted for a few days of rehab.  From this stretcher pick-up, they will be flown to an intermediate base and medical tent, where they will be checked by doctors.  After this, they will be cleared to return to their native countries.  Roman Romanenkow will go to Russia, Tom Marshburn to the United States, and Chris Hadfield will return to Canada.
There's 35 minutes to landing, and 10 minutes until they disconnect the non-essential parts of the craft.  Communications are about to be picked up by a circling plane, which is also pretty neat.  But anyhow, I'm going to go watch this stuff. Goodnight!

May 9

More writing as procrastination!  This time, we're going to talk about one of the strangest places I've encountered on the internet.  And I like that.  It's here: http://www.reddit.com/r/fifthworldproblems/

What's a fifth world problem?  Well:

• My cat failed to land on its feet and now my floor is expanding downwards to compensate. 
• I made a deal with a powerful trans-dimesional being for 1000 years of life. Now I'm a tree.
• I've dyed my hair a color that isn't in the visible spectrum.

And other such wonders, including my personal favourite: "Someone just told me my exact velocity and now I'm lost."  It's a physics joke.  And incredibly funny, if you're wondering. 
What on earth is it going on about? Well, it not being on earth is sort of the point.  The idea is that having access to the fifth dimension gives some degree of control over the first few.  But its become more of a novelty zone for playing with logic and paradox and other fallacy.  To great success: it has 36000 subscribers and is one of the more active communities with a number so comparatively small (the largest subreddits are over 1 million). I've spent about an hour this evening being cracked up and bewildered, and having my horizons expanded, or at least my imagination.  Another place that cracks me up is here: http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/page/735
It's called garfield minus garfield, and is exactly that.  Which amounts to Jon posing deep and alarming questions to himself.  And I can't even handle it.
Anyway, that's all for now!

May 8th

It's a pretty large stretch, at least in my family, between myself and my mother's 2nd cousin, who lives in Paris.  But that gap is shrinking, rapidly, as a story with more twists than a coastal road is unfolding across the globe.  This woman, Nadine is the only name I know her by, has an interesting past.  She lived in the French resort town of Nice, which is one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen.  Then she moved to Paris, and the story gets more intense.  Her two young girls were sexually assaulted by their father, who she divorced. After a long police process that exposed the uselessness of the French system in many regards, the kids still spend time with him.  They were staying with him while she made a spiritual trip to India, to seek meditation in a place known as an ashram.  Think dojo, it's a place based on seclusion and meditation.  People there have reported since that she was acting erratically, and many facets of her behavior were different on this stay than on other visits.  Her sudden departure from the first ashram in favour of a second, unplanned, remote one, was also noted.  But she never arrived at the second ashram.  At this point the alarm was raised.  Family was alerted, and after an extended battle with French and Indian authorities, somehow it became known that she had left the country by air.  This was good news in that she had not been kidnapped, and was travelling under her own will.  But it was also concerning, because of her behaviors at the ashram and increasingly erratic behavior.  People pulled strings and connections worldwide, and through a series of people doing things that could cost them their jobs, we discovered that her phone was in Dubai.  Sure enough, we learned that she had boarded a flight to Dubai, with final destination Paris.  But she had not made the Paris flight, despite it being hours later.  This would be understandable if the flight to Dubai had been even remotely near the plan, but she left a full week before plan.  Today's latest development is that she has boarded another flight, this time to Bahrain.  That's it for the concrete at this point.  We remain bewildered by this whole event, and much of my family is shaken up and trying to help.  I've never met Nadine, and am emotionally somewhat unaffected.  But I felt that the sheer absurdity of this plot needed to be written out, and this is as good a place as any.

May 7

I find most often that this blog is an escape from real work, an illusion of productivity through which I can make things that are useful, while not actually challenging myself. Which is a little unfortunate, because not only is this something that should get done, but it's often as important as the other things.  But the way that it comes so easily, so readily that it doesn't even feel like work, comforts me.  This sort of writing is what I want to pursue in the future.  I have no idea how.  But I do know, with some certainty, that writing stream-of-consciousness comes naturally to me.  Which makes sense, because that's the point.  But more importantly, I've been told I do it well.  Between the run-on sentences and rambling nature of my writing, I can make a reader stick around sometimes.  And I had a lot of fun doing that on the Travels blog.  I hope to do more of those, in the new season. Or maybe even in the off-season, just for kicks.  Who knows.

I do have an issue with not picking a direction.  As you can see, that paragraph ended on a completely different note than it began on.  I have no idea whether that's okay or not. And that sort of thing is what I feel I'm lacking.  I've never received a paper with red ink telling me to change the way I write.  Which is good and bad.  I'm already off the direction here, and that transition was awkward. I suppose that's what editing is for. But this is stream-of-consciousness writing! We do what we want here!

I don't know what else to write here! This post might be done. I might be done.  I'm sure tired.  Which sucks, because I've been sleeping well!  Maybe that's what I'll write about tomorrow.