Just finishing up an absolutely wonderful yoga session and am in a terrific mood. Turns out that yoga is a lot more enjoyable to do for me while listening to intense rock music. Yes, ironic because I know its supposed to be relaxing–but thats something strange about me…I’m most relaxed when I’m intense. Yeah, so after a year of struggling with yoga, today it felt like I actually was doing it right. I feel like I’m actually getting into the positions instead of reaching for the unobtainable (my toes!).

Hmph, but thats the least of the many amazing things going on right now. I’m absolutely loving my time here up with Curts family. They are all really cool and I never have a shortage of good conversation or company.  We watch a lot of the same shows and they love to talk about all sorts of things. Plus we got a great Rock Band going (the Fischer-price kind), which is really fun (me on guitar, Krisit on drums, Curt on bass, and Lee (their mom) on vocals).  The setup down here is pretty sweet and I have everything I need. Not to mention they eat really cool and healthy foods so I have no end to the supply of good eats, including the recent purchase of a VitaMix–the amazing blender that can do just bout anything.

Carrabas isn’t the greatest of greats but its not bad. The staff is pretty friendly even if they aren’t the kind I’d hang out with after work. But it gets the job done. I’ve already made enough to pay off the credit card and should be all out of debt by summer, which is my goal–with exclusion of the $20,000 or so Stafford Loan. I’ve got ages to pay that one off.  So yeah, Carrabas seems to be settling in at around $250-$300 a week which isn’t bad given that its only 3-6 hours a day, five to six days a week.

But wait, wait. That isn’t the half of it. Due to the amazing guidance and help of my stellar USC professors I’m really on the right track for my dream job.  I’ve got two schools so far highly interested in me. I’m visiting Northwestern this weekend for their Grad student weekend (they’re paying) and will get a good sense of their program and the kind of atmosphere of the school (I already know its cold!). In addition, the director of the program at Pittsburgh seems to really like me. We had a great hour-long conversation last night and hit-it-off (if that can be used in an academic sense). He’s already opening up project opportunities to me, opening up the possibility for me to do some work and trips to Tokyo and possibly being able to be integral in setting up some sort of STS group at Pittsburgh.  Man is that appealing. Oh, and Baruch Fischhoff is down the street at Carnegie Mellon, so I’d get to do a bit of work with him as well–he’s kind of a super-star scholar within risk management research.

Yeah, so for once I have people vying for me instead of me begging for them. And I haven’t heard from ASU yet, which I saw as my best chance of getting accepted to! So this could be a hard choice. The visits sure will be awesome. I look forward to this weekend and to a visit to Pitt in near future as well.

But its not only that, you see. My ideas have come together so beautifully. If you didn’t see it, I have a post with a few academic projects I plan on trying to pursue. They might not sound like much but they are coming together very well in my head and I’m getting better and better at talking through them and articulating what they mean. Some are very practical ones (like the risk management stuff) while others are more philosophical and abstract (like my technological existentialism). Either way I am excited about all the projects and feel that even the most abstract are something concrete I can pursue (people have somewhat ignored my phrase “technological existentialism” because it sounds vague and meaningless, but I have some really important stuff in mind for it).

Beside the fact that my ideas are coming together, so is my CV (the academic resume). In addition to the excellent schools, I have also been given the opportunity to present my paper on Risk Management of Nanotechnology at the SC Political Science association annual conference. Its only a little casual conference but its a good one to start with. However, on a much grander scale, Gehrke has given me the opportunity to co-author a paper with him and to present it at the National Communication Association’s annual conference this November in San Francisco.  Thats only one of the biggest Communication conferences in the country…

I’m not writing all this to brag, I’m writing this because I’m happy and I am eternally grateful for the benevolence of everyone who have helped me out, from Curt’s family to my family to my great professors.  Thanks everyone.

Back in May of 2009 I had a nice pleasant little dream. I was going to start a professional blog. After all, I had a looot of good things to say. I am smart. I have a constant stream of ideas. And I was so full of my own sense of importance that I thought I deserved to be heard (I may still be of this opinion, but that is beside the point). I glorified blogging as the next stage of journalism, one where people can get news in a concise fashion quickly, that has been cross-checked and confirmed by the masses in solid Web 2.0 fashion, hyperlinked for sources, and–so I thought–balanced by the general mass of information available. Riiight.

I started writing. I wrote some good stuff. My What Happened to Nuclear Power post shows up second in google if you type in that question and is a much more informed article than the first one that shows up.  It still gets maybe 10 views a day, with no promotion. But that was only one article and probably my best. It utilized an immense amount of information, assimilating a long course of study into a reasonably concise article. But most of the other stuff I put up there in my pretty much daily posting was all mostly a lot of bullshit. I mean, I’d just see something in the news or in something I was reading, have a thought, and write it up. Never mind whether I understood it or whether I really knew what was going on. Never mind depth. Never mind content. It just had to be interesting and well phrased. In less than a month I was getting about 100 views per day. I mean, not much. But I think I could’ve maybe made something of it. Maybe. I definitely made it out to be a big deal. I planned it forever, spent a week getting the format just write (even learning some XML and CSS), and talked everyone’s ear off about how important it was.

But then I realized something. I didn’t really know what I was talking about. If I did it was only a superficial knowledge briefly gained then I’d move on. This is my complaint against journalism in general–it is a superficial understanding that allows us a peak and then we move on.  Sure this may be necessary–there is too much info out there for us all to be experts–but I found out it is not something I want to be.

Then there is the rhetorical aspects of journalism, but most especially blogging.  1/3 of my interests are in rhetorical theory (and I will most likely get a Ph.D in Communications…) so this is kind of a big deal. The way that we say things, especially in our sources of news, does an immense amount to define our outlook on the world, ourselves, and our society.  Need I say it? Journalism has become a sensationalist business. Blogging? Eh…I’ll let Jon Stewart take it from here:

Oh Jon Stewart…your wisdom is so immense. Btw, that clip will only be available for some 30 days because thats how Hulu does it. If its gone, just know its about how bloggers use words like “eviscerate” and “destroyed” to speak about every day happenings, exaggerating and overdramatizing every day interactions to add to their sensational feel. Its like the whole news/blogosphere has become the National Inquirer, finding aliens where there was only a low flying helicopter.

Jon Stewart himself is a great comparison point. You know he does his research and he knows his stuff. He may be a comedian but you know where the bias is and its all in good humor. After watching O’Reily you get this impending sense of dread about the world. After watching Stewart…you just get a sense of the absurdity of our lives and (more than anything) the depiction of it in our news organizations. Yet for some reason people seem to be saying that its horrible to use Stewart as a news source and Stewart must also go along with that sentiment. According to O’Reilly, everyone who takes Stewart seriously are “extreme liberals” or..what was it…”twenty-something stoners” I believe it was. Hmph. I guess that must be me.

Now the Onion or even Colbert Report I can understand. They sustain personas that make it impossible to tell news from reality. Stewart? He does a great job of separating it out. And its not like I’d stop there on the news. Stewart is just a nice 30 min highlight of the news just like the 6:00 nightly news (which really only has 20 min worth of news somehow spread over an hour). If I’m interested in knowing more about whats going on, then I google search it. Maybe get a blog or two …I mean find a few articles or videos on a couple of the major news networks and get a better feel for whats going on. Otherwise, whats wrong with Stewart? Surely an explicit joke is far better than the implicit joke that is most of the rest of the media.

So look at that, three rants in one blog post.

Speaking of which…why then am I still blogging right now? Easy. This is for me. Yay, you read it. Cool. Comment if you want, that’s great. But I didn’t write it for you, although I do appreciate it when my friends take a look at my blog. Its just my thoughts. Yep.

When I was a child I had a vague notion of history. I remember trying to comprehend it.  History looked like an expanse of stained and yellowing paper with a dark timeline running through the middle of it. Cars were invented sometime in the past…sometime after knights fought for kings but probably before the TV was invented. The Revolutionary War was just before the Civil War because thats how we learned it in school–not much happened between so the times became condensed in my mind. And surely it was a long long time ago that people didn’t have light bulbs, air conditioning, toilets (seriously, how did people live without toilets!), and cars. I mean, at least they had trains for a long time before cars. And telephones too.  All of this was in some grand past long dead and incomprehensible. Just a timeline.

Some quick facts. It is 2010. The personal computer did not exist thirty years ago. Schools were still segregated 50 years ago. World War 2 was some 70 years ago. The great depression was some 80 years ago, and World War 1 was about 90 years ago. Slavery existed 150 years ago.

The lightbulb was invented in 1880. Before that everyone used candles and after that it took many many years for lights to become widespread.  That was130 years ago.  Think about that for a moment. The lightbulb changed the character of our existence forever. We could go to sleep any time. We could work at night, live at night. Before, darkness was impenetrable except for our feeble attempts with fire and our prayers to the stars and moon that they would shine brighter and light our way. Now we live by the lights we have artificially created.

Right around the same time, 1885, the first widely recognized internal combustion engine was built. Again, only 125 years ago. Before that you hardly could leave you town. When you did you had to travel long distances slowly or expensively. You had to get on a horse or ride in a carriage or walk. Your neighbors were the people you knew because you couldn’t know anyone else. Think of how much time we spend in cars. Think of the places we go, with such speed and consistency. Take all that away. Only a 125 years ago. Two average lifespans. And of course automobiles weren’t even common until after Ford, in the 1900s, and didn’t become a real part of every day life until even later. Yes, we had trains before but they were still quite different. And this is saying nothing of airplanes, which allow us to travel across the world in hours instead of months or even years.

Should I speak also of telephones and the fact that before we could only talk to people whom we had traveled long distances (quite slowly) to see or had carefully written to? I won’t even mention computers. Or the thousands of other integral technologies in our lives that we don’t really notice but which readily shape our lives. Polyester. Plastic. Air conditioning. And so on.

The industrial revolution occurred around the late 1700s, with the invention of the cotton gin, steam engine, and the use of iron. It really picked up steam (no pun intended) around the 1850s. 160 years ago. How long is that for a world to completely change character? In such a sense as it has…such an extreme sense. Its incomprehensible. Life as those people knew it is gone, perhaps forever. We either find ourselves entirely unable to comprehend such an existence or completely aghast at the thought of it.

Such a short time and such change. The whole nature of our experience stands altered by what we have created.

This is, again, the sort of thing I seek to study in my life–the way that the life we have created for ourselves frames and shapes the nature of our existence. Trying to comprehend the existence of pre-1850s in nearly impossible. I was fascinated tonight by Pride and Prejudice for that reason alone, nevermind the fact that its a Jane Austen romance. The world of then is not the world of now and a mere 150 years (200 in the case of Austen) separates us from that existence. How things have changed. How all of life has changed! What is this existence that we are living now!? How absurd and how fascinating!

I’ve thought about questions like this for a long time. I spent a long time on “What is happiness?” This question is almost as complicated and interesting as that one.

I speak passively, even coldly, but this is obviously something thats been bothering me for a long time, something which I feel very passionate about. The question was there through my whole relationship with Kayley and has weighed heavily on my mind since it ended.

My first thought is to wonder whether the concept has any meaning at all.  But of course it does. We use it all too often. We mean something by it. The word “love” puts a name on a desire, just like the word “happiness.”  Happiness entails the desire for purpose and for a positive (subjectively so) experience in our existence (this was my conclusion before). What desire is love? Why do we seek it so diligently and so desperately?

Love, of course, is a social desire. As I am coming to understand it, love is born out of the intense loneliness of our existence. Our experience entails that we can only know ourselves, and even that somewhat hazily (as we constantly recreate and redefine ourselves in our every day lives). We cannot be someone else, i.e. we cannot experience their experience, seeing the world as they do, with their set of knowledge and memories, with their train of thought, with their bodily experience, and their social situation. So we can never fully comprehend another being. All we can do to connect, to comprehend another being, is to use our limited and woefully insufficient tools–words, physical contact, imagination, art. Thus loneliness is born, an intense feeling of disconnect. These people around us appear like objects, unknowns, unable to be comprehended.  Likewise we see others and know that we are not comprehended but are constantly misunderstood and mis-characterized. We desire to be comprehended and we desire to comprehend.

While our mediums of communication are, in the end, ineffective at completely knowing another person they are enough to give us a sense of another’s existence, a hope for the intertwining of two existences, for the beginnings of a mutual comprehension of another’s experience.

Nature has built for us a physical counterpart for this philosophical desire. We call its sex.  But in a broader sense it is the whole sense of attraction that we feel for family–for children, for lovers, for parents–all of which are either a part of us or which we exchange physical intimacy with in–all of which is physical

So as far as I can see there are three reasons we love, which essentially makes up the three elements of love.

1. The desire to comprehend another’s existence, and to be comprehended
2. The overcoming of loneliness, to share one’s experience
3. Sexual and physical desire

These are the reasons we seek relationships. Elements of these three are what form love. The second involves the sort of thing we have when we say that someone is “really fun to be around.”  The first is more implicit, involving knowing the other person–on a simple level their likes and dislikes, on a more complex one, their deeper desires, feelings, and preferences. Both one and two involve the sort of thing we share when we help each other out and listen to another’s thoughts, concerns and feelings.

Thats my basic conclusion. I have some more questions about the role of sex in relation to the first two but that is an issue for another moment. Specifically, I wonder about the classifications we use in “friend”, “lover”, “boyfriend/girlfriend”, “fiancee”, “husband/wife.” What do all these labels mean given the three reasons that people love? How does relationships change between each? What use do these labels have for us? I have some thoughts on it but I’ll wait for another post.

Last night I watched the Borne Identity. I remember that movie coming out as well as its three following. It came out 8 years ago. Eight. Years.  The cars look different, the people dress differently, even the movie quality is different.

When one is young the past is a black hole, an ineffable unknown. The Beatles, Casablanca, even the Cold War, Nixon,  and hippies are just tales we are told, stories recounted, and old recordings that often show up on the History Channel.  As a teenager, coming into your own, there seems like almost nothing existed before. All these things people talk about, all their worries, all their nostalgia, seems so strange and backward. It is because you don’t remember the Nixon scandal, the fear of the inevitable nuclear destruction, or the wonderful excitement of the Beatles at their height.  The childhood you do have is a blur of memories, hardly enough to do more than incite passing nostalgia for Ninja Turtles and Super Nintendo games.

But now its coming to me, history. I remember. Life really began right around 2000 for me, when I entered my teenage years and started to pay attention, started to remember, started to mark the time. Then there were memories. There were “periods” in my life. I recount them now like history. My first girlfriend, my time in the band playing piccolo, my estrangement from the world, my attempt to find a world in Utah, my year of confusion, my leaving the church, my relationship with Kayley–they are there, in my mind, in my past. But they fly away, they move further from the present and I cannot believe the pace at which they retreat. Kayley was already six months ago. My mission fiasco nearly 3 years now. 3 years…

It has been five years since I graduated from high school. And the time flows onward, flies onward. Before I know it I will be here again, five years from now, graduating with a Ph.D and thinking “It was five years since I graduated college!” And it flows on, never stopping. Nor do I want it to stop, only that it becomes untouchable the more it moves. And I can miss it. I can feel nostalgia. I can fill in history. I can remember. I can remember September 11. I can remember Bush. I can remember cell phones, the rise of computers, the introduction of flat screen TVs.

Is this what it means to grow up? Is this wisdom? Or is this merely age and the weight of living onward? What will it be like when I am 80? What if I could live for another hundred years? The distance would grow so long. Would I think back and remember the cute, sweet red-headed girl who was the first to win my heart? Will I recall the existence I have now, the feelings I feel?

Even if I did, it would be as a stranger reading a book, seeing, as a different person, the world of another that has long been past.  So it goes.