Nutritional Value

Still half asleep, I've wandered over to my computer once more to blog. This constant blogging is more challenging than I thought it would be. Just about 18 days to go, though, then the challenge is through. 18 days till the end of the first decade of the second millennium since we adopted this calendar. It seems like an amazingly long time. But humans have been around forever. If the first humans had figured they needed a calendar and had been keeping track since then, it is possible that we would be writing out the date as 11³.003*872 or something to that nature (and I shall say to any math geeks that that number is completely made up). Of course we still might have changed it something simpler.

Wouldn't it be mad if everyone could just instantly do a calculation like the one I put up there in there head? If we were all so freaking intelligent that we just automatically could understand the value of almost any equation? I can't even tell you what 11³ is without checking on a calculator. But in a world were everyone was so amazing at math I have to assume that we would be much better at a lot of things. We would know how to reach out with art in ways that we haven't even thought of yet. Our planet could be under our control, with a council of citizens who got together to decide what areas should get snow or rain. With a government that was run so efficiently, so smoothly, that we would have all of our needs met so long as we maintained some sort of involvement in society.

Of course that is just gibberish. Mathematicians who look into the face of infinity calculations often go mad. And I don't believe that there is any time in our future where we won't be just completely idiotic. Paul spent ten minutes in the bathroom waiting for someone to come get him because a card in a game told him to (the game was called Quelf if you are interested). I pretended to be covered in hot lava (well, just lava I suppose, as I believe it is called something else when it cools down. I forget though, I mean, I've heard of lava rocks, but that might just be the layman term for whatever that type of rock is. Anyway, it was hot, damnit.) Brianna spent half the night with a box under her shirt. We are simply designed to be idiotic. If we have to be smart and efficient all the time we end up just wanting to kill everyone. No matter how smart we get, how good our technology gets, how high a level our society achieves, we are still going to need to act like idiots. We still have to make fools of ourselves, get drunk and do stupid things, and stay out partying till dawn even though we have something important to do in the morning. Otherwise we become machines, we become zombies stuck in automated motion. We become nothing. Stupidity is what gives us our humanity.

I don't know anything. Not really, and I'm not talking in some philosophical way, I mean I know nothing. Who won the world series last year? I don't know. Why does it only snow when the temperature is within a certain range and not when it is below it? I don't know. Why am I writing a blog at 2 am instead of going to bed like my body has been trying to get me to do all day? Well, thats because I am an idiot.

When I was younger I thought I knew pretty much everything I'd ever need to know about life. Now, still a fairly young adult, I am realizing that I don't know the tiniest fraction of what I need to know about life. Sometimes I wished I lived in some sort of commune where everyone had the exact same level of knowledge. I mean, some people would have to be better at some things for us to function, but I am talking about living in a little place were we only allow X books and Y movies and Z television shows. We can only read or watch or listen to what is brought in, we all know each other, we all talk to each other, we never bother with trivia questions. And we never really run out of things to talk to each other about. How many times have you been at a party and everyone starts talking about some movie they had all seen and you hadn't? You just sit there and sort of listen but mostly get bored. If everyone you knew had all seen the exact same movies, you could talk endlessly with them all the time on the subject of movies.

Obviously there is a need for diversity. I can't ever see or read everything, but I can bring to the table the information I have and try to combine it with other peoples so we can all enhance our knowledge. This is why I don't think we will really see a commune like that, although, the more I think about it, the more I realize that I've just said that I wanted to go and live in a cult somewhere. Again, let me refer you to the fact that I am an idiot.

There was something somewhere out there on the internet that I was reading that was talking about a writers DNA. Not in the sense of their actual DNA, but in the sense that no matter what you do, what you write, you will always write in a style so specific and unique that it could only have been written by that one person. I think it applies to everyone, not just people who write a lot. It's weird to think about, though there are a handful of authors out there that I am quite confident that if I was presented with an annoynomus short story written by them I would be able to identify their voice within it. I bring this up because I feel like I have probably covered all this ground before. That I've spoken on the subject of stupidity in a positive manner, but I can't remember a time that I've actually done that. Of course when I go back and read some of my older posts or journals I realize that I have almost no recollection of actually writing most of those things. Honestly, I couldn't tell you half of what I had written on this blog in the last week. Maybe that is just part of why all writing by the same author sounds so similar, we just repeat ourselves over and over again until we die, not realizing that we've already said everything we were thinking about.

There is a halfway decent chance that I just nodded off while taking a moment to think about what to say next. To an intelligent person that would be a good indication that it was time to stop writing and go to bed.

I had been planning on talking about the conference in Oregon on this blog, but I can't think of too much to tell about it. It felt like most of the time it was just about having new members get together and meet each other. We were in classes a lot of the time, but the classes involved a lot of arts and crafts and very quickly thrown together presentations we were asked to do. They gave me a tote bag and a t-shirt that say "Vista" on them. I also got some buttons. One day I went on a walk around the town and realized that it felt almost exactly like every other Oregon town I've ever been in. I also realized that I have wandered around, usually on my own, in several Oregon towns, and in those occasions I have occasionally been drunk. I have bought at least ten books from book stores in Oregon. I have never eaten sea food while in Oregon.

There was one day when I had a little free time to hang out and I couldn't go back to my room because they had stuck me at a different hotel than the one the conference was in because I was one of the lucky few that didn't get a room there. I found myself laying on a couch in the lobby reading some Vonnegut (which I have been pronouncing "Vognet" for some time now without realizing I was doing that) and a girl I had barely talked to at before that point was chatting with her dad on the phone a few feet away. That was possibly the most comfortable I'd been in a long time. Everything just felt right, and having a cute girl sitting next to me having an informal conversation that I didn't have to pay any attention to at all made it feel like I was finally at peace with the world. I realized how much I've been missing by not having someone in my life. Normally when I think about getting a girlfriend all I can think about is going on dates and engaging in small talk for a few hours in the hopes that she will eventually want to sleep with me. I forgot about those quiet moments. Normally I figure if I am not doing something with other people there is really no point in being around those people. If we are just sitting around I get bored and want to go home and turn on Netflix or Hulu or read a book or a comic or two. But I'm so damn isolated.

There was no way to know for certain, but I felt like I was a sort of different person in those classes than I had ever been at UNR. It has been a while, and even though I often feel my life has stagnated, I suppose that my personality is changing ever so slightly. In a way its terrifying to realize that you have been living with a different person than you thought you were living with, especially when that person is you. But it wasn't like I was a stranger there, myself. Being forced to have endless small talk with people, to repeat everything that I had already said over and over and over again to a cacophony (I love that word, cacophony, I'm probably using it incorrectly, but I don't care) of people that I would probably not talk to ever again just gave me a chance to focus on the little parts of socializing I often over look. Still, I didn't care so much about what they were saying. There were so many people that told me the whole rundown of who they were and what they were doing with Vista and I lost interest after the second person. Actually, I sort of lost interest before that. But we have to talk to get to know one another. Even if it is inane babble. You talk to someone for five minutes and all of a sudden, even though you really know almost nothing about them, they cease to be a stranger and become this person that has some things to say to you from time to time. And the transformation is instantaneous. From stranger to friend in a heart beat. If I ever meet most of them again, though, I probably won't remember them, won't remember anything about them. We will be passing trains in the night once more. But a quick howdy and we are back to being friends. At least for the moment.

Not that there is a problem with that. Our Monkeysphere can only handle about one hundred and fifty people at a time. Monkey's can only really register a certain number (I think around fifty) of other monkey's as actually being part of their world. Any monkey that they don't know and haven't had contact with gets a completely different treatment than the ones within their Monkeysphere. That isn't to say that who is in the Monkeysphere is a constant, it changes. We can allow others in at the expense of pushing some of the people we haven't seen for a while out. Humans can only register 150 different humans. That means that we only really think of about 150 out of the 6 billion people on earth as actually, living, breathing humans at a time. The rest are just grouped and sorted and we can't tell them from Adam. We don't bother to think or worry about these other people because they are not really real. They don't exist in our world. They aren't even part of our karass. The Monkeysphere theory was written by a comedian whose name I can't remember.

Those people I met were in my Monkeysphere for a few days. They lived, they had issues, they had personalities. When I remember them in a few weeks, though, they will become generic stereotypes in my mind. This isn't because they aren't nice people, or that I don't actually give a shit about any of them, as I feel I give at least some sort of shit about them, but simply because my Monkeysphere can't handle that many people. They will simply fall into the background of my brain, allowing room for others to come in. I wonder who got pushed out already. I wonder how many people have ever had a chance to make it back in. I remember the first time I met Sara I couldn't register her as a person at all. I didn't remember, just days later, that she had even been there, that I had already met this person I thought I was meeting for the first time. My Monkeysphere must have been full that day. She made it in though, my brain must have turned someone else I hadn't seen in a while into a caricature. There are probably thousands of people that have been pushed out of my Monkeysphere. It's enjoyable to realize that its simply because my brain can't handle that many people and not because I am a forgetful ass.

There is so much in these blogs that I want to start weaving into fiction. I've decided that I need to go back to carrying around my little notebooks but instead of just jotting down random ideas I should write full stories in them. Grammatically incorrect with horrible spelling and handwriting, but just write them down. Then strip out the good parts of them later. Flash writing. Lightning stories. Story-storming. I'm sort of stuck on a lightning theme for what to call them, but I think you get my meaning

Cheb blamed me for his wanting to write some fiction over the break from school in his last blog. He blamed me because I convinced him to blog a hell of a lot more, and all that writing was making him want to write more. Funny how that works.


Editors note: I found the link to the original Monkeysphere article. The author is David Wong.