Oh Ye of Little Faith

Brilliant!

Good ole Rowan Atkinson.

The Road Goes Ever On and On...

I'm ready to go on to morning shift. That's 6 am to noon here, and I'll be trying to wake up at 4:30, to leave the house by 5:30, and have some room for sanity before I go.

But I was reading my sister's blog, and she was talking about hiking around Santa Clarita, and was asking about some of the places around there.

I thought back to where I would go, and what I would do, because I realize now that I used to go sort of wilderness romping quite a lot - something I haven't done nearly as much in the military. I keep talking about it but never really bother to plan to do it.

When I was in elementary school my best friend was Mike Lightner, of the lightner clan, and behind their house was a hill that was too sheer for track homes to crawl up, I guess. It was also too sheer for bikes, generally, so we used to walk up around there. I can't imagine it was very big, but we somehow found places to go. I particularly remember there was some sort of naturally enclosed, sort of "secret garden" place, that found once and couldn't find again. There was also a long, deep drain running down one part, I think it was while they were building houses on top. Mike broke his arm or sprained his wrist or something when we were climbing around in there.

During that time, and after, I'd take my bike behind...I think it was Bouquet Park. It was on the other Wellston. There was always a section in the fence that could be pushed thru to get back to the hills back behind there. I almost guarantee there are track homes there now, but it was all sort of chapparell (or however that's spelled) desert when I went. There we tons of jumps on little trails that someone or other had smashed and dug at some point before I got there.

I remember at least once I was riding or walking on this long horseshoe shaped road on top of one of the hills. It was probably a service road. I got back to the very back of it...the portion furthest from the park, probably at least a mile back (as the crow flies, if you will), and I looked out and there were these hills literally as far as I could see, without any sign of people or buildings on them. I compared it to the Lord of the Rings (in my mind), which I'm also rereading right now. I loved having those seemingly endless swathes of "wilderness" outside my door.

I do miss those places and I know of little that's comparable right here. It probably would be difficult to find a comparison to my child's memory anyway, as these places were undoubtedly far less pristine than I remember, and here everything is bound by roads or farms. Just fly over this place and look at the window. Every square mile is covered with farms...quite literally, in some areas.

But I've resolved to do at least one camping trip this summer, somewhere near here, or else I'm sure I'll regret my homebodyness while I was here. This weekend I'm going back up to duck lake, so we'll see if we can't find some buried treasure this time.

Gracious

I haven't posted in a while. These cruel dipthorians mount the raging rays.

Here's a short, 15 min clip of a physicist talking about what's going to be happening in the LHC (the Large Hadron Collider), where we'll hopefully be able to see what was happening billionths of a second after our universe began. Very cool stuff.

No Intelligence Allowed

I just saw Expelled, out of pure morbid curiosity. I like to sit on it for a bit, whenever I am confronted with an argument contrary to a position I hold, so I can be sure I'm actually considering it.

Eat, Drink, and Be Merry, for Tomorrow, we Fly

Except I probably shouldn't eat anything crazy, I definitely shouldn't drink, and "crew rest" fairly prohibits me from being merry with anything more than what's already in my apartment - which, don't get me wrong, aint bad.

I'm fairly nervous, as I always am when going into something new or very different. Every time I go to a new place or start a new class or a new activity I get somewhat nervous the day or so before, so I guess this is expected. Thinking back in recent memory, I think the only things I was really justifiably nervous about were Survival School, and Basic Training. Everything else has been no big deal. This also, I'm sure, will be no big deal, and might end up being actually kind of cool.

There's some kind of psychological therapy that focuses on just thinking about things rationally. An example of this would be something like if your significant other was an hour or two late from work. Instead of automatically assuming the worst, it would have you stop, and think about all the more realistic possibilities (their phone died and they had to stay late, they had car trouble on the way home, they had some other appointment you forgot about or maybe they forgot to tell you) and realize the reality of your worst fear being true is pretty slim. In this situation, even though my worst fear isn't very solidified, the flight will probably, nevertheless, go by with a minimum of incident. I know the stuff I'm supposed to know, and I've never come across much of anything that I couldn't handle with relative ease - at least as far as these standardized things go.

I look at some of the people that have gone before me, and I figure they might as well skip the five flights and just graduate me after this one. Sorry if this post isn't exciting, it's more to myself. By 1630 tomorrow, hopefully, it'll all be done. And in three months or so it'll just be a dim memory.

Embracing the Absurd

There is no purpose. Imagine we're floating through this ether, oblivious to earth and sky. Imagine this utter absurdity, such that even rationality is a farce - a manifestation of our fear in the face of complete intellectual incoherence.

Imagine also, how this frees us. When we became conscious we stepped out of the prison of this world, and we became limitless.

This is existentialism.