1a.
“Hey, you know, I was just thinking,” I say excitedly to her as we sit in the pizza shoppe we like to frequent, eager to share some interesting ideas with her.
“Just thinking what?” she asks, smiling.
“Hm. . . I don’t really know anymore,” I answer, puzzled.
Then I realize what’s going on.
Just watched this Scientific American video on stress adaptation / management. Great to get a glimpse of the mechanics of stress and how we can tune our response to stressors.
While in Logan Airport early one morning before a flight, I heard some chirping that seemed to be coming from within the airport, really close by. Then I saw them: sparrows! How did they get in? Do they later get shooed out? I bet they were after the bits of food debris littering the floor…
I recently watched this video by The Cornell Lab of Ornithology and was delighted and amazed. The natural world is full of wonder…
The shock waves rocked several city blocks and could be heard from miles around, but fortunately there were no injuries—to people, that is. The negative emotions containment facility had been evacuated expediently at the first sign of trouble, all safety precautions enacted without delay. And while those precautions ultimately could not prevent the blast and its ensuing conflagration, they did contain it and ensure the wellbeing of the community. I was asleep at the time, but my roommate woke me up after hearing the frightening boom resound throughout the city. Together, we watched the news coverage on the television, which he had immediately turned on to find out the source of this thunderous sound. On the glowing screen before us, we saw the raging flames of the monstrous firestorm engulfing what was left of the facility and the surrounding wooded hills, the blaze reaching up high into the starry sky. Behind the reporters, containment teams were working furiously to bring it under control with hoses blasting chemically treated water. By morning, it was over, leaving the charred skeleton of the facility, burnt up forests full of ash and clouds of dark smoke hanging over them, blown slowly east by the wind to the plains upon which they would later rain their caustic waters.
The storage facility was situated on the outskirts of the city, placed in such a remote location in case anything like this ever happened. It was designed as a holding station for hazardous human substances before they could be properly disposed of at the treatment facility, which despite operating at maximum capacity, was always overrun dealing with these environmentally and socially destructive materials. It was meant as a temporary measure to safely house these things until another treatment facility could be constructed. Continue reading
After listening to the Weekend Edition piece “Emily Moore On How She Became A Poet”, I was intrigued by Emily’s description of her band‘s music. Several iTunes samples and a couple purchases later, I was grinning and chuckling adolescently, like the whole of my adolescent heritage had been validated with tasteful humor.
My faves:
I still remember that morning when the incredible, astonishing truth was revealed to us, the truth you have come to know so intuitively and intimately. I watched it live on the wall-mounted television, sitting silently with my peers in the company cafeteria, the air still and cold, some of us sipping coffee. After some introductory remarks (dominated by the discouraging conditions of the economy, the nation’s morale and the environment; yes, in that order), our leader announced this simple, defining, revolutionary fact. We are all heroes. More precisely, we are all latent heroes, all capable of championing myriad causes, each in our own way. It was a shocking revelation, one long suppressed by generations of oligarchic rule for fear that this crucial knowledge would jeopardize their power. But now they realized they were in desperate need of heroics, to undo the dilapidation their elitism had incurred on us all.
It’s incredible where we as a species have walked and what we have seen. Thanks, Carl Sagan and Reid Gower.
Ever wonder why you don’t see the color pink after passing white light through a prism to get the visible light spectrum? This video does a great job of explaining the nature of the color pink/magenta.
Watch the full video with related content here: http://www.richannel.org/colour-mixing-and-the-mystery-of-magenta
My friend eats her salad savagely, like she’s been stranded on a remote island without salad, or any conventional food for that matter, for days or weeks. With supreme unconcern for etiquette, she devours the lettuce, tomatoes, cheese and croutons eagerly, voraciously, viciously. She’s still using her fork but in a rather grotesque manner, like she’s invented a new way to be barbaric with silverware. It’s quite unbecoming, especially with the hat she’s wearing. A perfect example of discomplementarity, in fact. The hat and her salad-eating are just repulsive in their spatial and temporal juxtaposition, simply aesthetically odious in combination.
But for the sake of our friendship, I keep these opinions to myself.
She looks up at me, her lips slathered with ranch dressing, her fork suspended in the air at a hideous angle, an obscene amount of salad components affixed to the prongs. I wince at the horrendous sight. Fortunately, she doesn’t seem to notice this irrepressible manifestation of my disgust.
“Halogen lamps?” she mumbles, intermittently revealing a mouth- ful of chunky, partially manducated vegetarian hodgepodge with her words.
“Yeah, I like them better than ordinary incandescent ones,” I reply, averting my eyes from the appalling mess.
“But the…energy consumption is…still quite high,” she says, her enunciation still hampered by her continued mastication of salad.
“Well, I know, but I can’t quite get used to the feel of fluorescent lighting in certain places,” I tell her, then take a sip of my espresso.
“Mmmnnn,” she murmurs.
I can’t tell if her utterance is in response to my remark or the salad. I’m about to overlook it, but I start to sense an air of condescension about it, disapproval or even scorn towards my choice of lighting. Maybe this feeling is just my imagination, but it bothers me nonetheless.
“What?” I can’t stop myself from saying rather confrontationally.
“That piece of radish was just awful. Clearly several days too old,” she says, jabbing at the remaining greens with evident vexation.
I’m glad to hear the salad is the object of her irritation, but then I start to think I’d rather be the one who has irked her. She’s clearly paying more attention to the salad than me. And I realize that I’ve never been subjected to her savageness and further realize, reluctantly, that maybe I would like to be, just once. To glimpse what lies beyond our very civil relationship.
A Contemplative Compilation 