Googling Oneself

So today I have a lot of things to catch up on... so many little things I've let go far too long, and a full free day to tackle them.  So of course I start by hopping onto the information superhighway to discover what my cyberself looks like.

And guess what I have unearthed.  I look like nothing.  I have absolutely zero web presence, at least 30 other people have my same name in similar fields (but are not me!) and even "wonderfool" refers to like 10 different things.  And of course this has gotten me thinking:  there are just so many people in the world.

And if the powers that be are right about this "overpopulation" thing... that means there wasn't always this many people.  So there are more people, and we can connect to all of them (in that gloriously superficial electronic way.)  

But what would it be like to have fewer people in general?  Would we have accomplished as much?  Would we be on a slight delay, or would culture be changed entirely?  No traffic at rush hour... or no rush hour?  No lines at stores, or no stores, or just different stores?  Maybe fewer stores, so there'd still be lines... you just had to drive further to get to a store.  Cities would feel the way suburbs feel now, suburbs would be rural, and rural areas would be desolate.  But we wouldn't know the difference, because we would never know society as we know it now.  So essentially, it follows that we could also have MORE overpopulation, with denser metropolises, and cities expanding out so much they start meshing with other cities to create gargantuan urban regions, all houses would be apartments, everything cordoned off and disjointed, porches and backyards would join the ranks of dodo birds and wooly mammoths... but again, we wouldn't know it.  It would just be how the world is.

Okay, I guess I can't procrastinate much longer.   In a universe where I always procrastinate, I wouldn't know what it was like to complete anything and never would complete anything, so I wouldn't even worry about not doing things, and for all intensive purposes, I'd be good as done when I started.  Conversely, if I never procrastinated I'd probably be done with everything right now, thus this universe I am currently in, one of measured balance between creation and destruction, is the worse possible universe for me to be in right now because it means I haven't done it yet but will.  So only this world out of the three requires work of me at the moment.  Glad we established that. 

Pardon, sir, have you the time?

Timing is everything.  This, like almost every -ism, is especially true in both comedy and day-to-day living.  That's probably why good comedy is so funny.  It's so obvious.

Today was amazing, and then, you know, somehow unsatisfying.  SOOOO close.  And each individual element was great.  It's like a car that doesn't work and you take it apart and each individual part is fine.  Is perfect, it's a wonderful car.  And not broken.  And yet, turn the key in the ignition... nothing.  So I don't know.  I guess that's why it's called a "model car."

It's been too long since I painted... 

Walking in a Winter Wonderland

Today was one of those days that was so cold it was painful to breathe.  And it seemed like I had to just keep going outside and coming back in, going back out and coming back in.  And my nose would be so cold sometimes, I'd think about those people that try to climb Mount Everest, and they get just past the first camp ground area when a snowstorm hits and they zip themselves in those bags, but it's still too cold and frostbite sets in and even though the rescue team braved the thin air in a helicopter against the better judgement of conventional science/procedures but were successful and saved the climbers, the frostbite destroyed their noses.  And maybe a finger.

And how awful would it be to be an amputee?  Especially the face area.  Why is it that we have such a strong emotional attachment to faces.  I guess they're so visible, and all so different that we derive identity from our face in a completely unique way.  

But what is it about identity that we are so emotional, so protective about?  Would it be so awful to have the same face as someone else?  Identical twins deal with this to some extent.  I wonder if I would like having a twin.  It seems like it would be nice to have someone who saw things the way you do all the time.  But then, do twins do that?  It could be like in adaptation, when Nick Cage says to himself, "We have the exact same DNA.  How lonely is that?" because his twin is so different and they don't understand each other.

On the other hand, it would be equally awful to have someone who thought the same as you, looked and acted the same as you, was exactly like you so that even those close to you could be fooled.  It be like having a doppelganger.  Which would be horrifying.

The other thing about the constant temperature change is that my hands cannot stay moisturized!  It's got to be the a combination of the weather and the incessant hand washing I have to do between Photography and Printmaking.  Man is that a lethal combination for skin!  

The snow is rather scenic though.  Somehow in spite of all this I still kinda love the magic of it.  It sparkles, and makes it so bright outside.  I guess the roads haven't been overly treacherous in about a week, so that's probably why I can start seeing it as snow again.  When I'm fishtailing, it's a blight on the land.

Overall Silliness, or Finding That Grain of Truth

So we were supposed to write about what we thought was going on in this Triptych for art history, and of course I've heard a few different interpretations, but what's stuck with me most is just how much that last panel looks like Hollywood's outer space.  I found I could not write about this piece without mentioning the obvious, but what you must first realize is that last semester I wrote an interpretation of a cave painting involving UFO's, because I swear that's what they looked like.  She claims they are giant, people-sized baskets, but then, she also claimed there is no good interpretation of that scene.  So you tell me.

Point is, I found myself getting sadly derailed, and I wish I could paste an excerpt in here for you but it won't let me.  Which brings me to my next point of the day, computers.  Um, how long exactly have we had personal computers?  So remind me again why we haven't been able to stop them from just freezing up and doing things we don't want them to for no reason all the time?  Why do we just start putting them in everything, so now all of our appliances are up to no good without our consent.  My DVR is a VCR that is overanalyzing everything and creating problems for itself (and so for me.)  My friend's phone (iPhone!) FREEZES UP.  What?  Sorry I couldn't call you, my cell phone crashed.  Apparently Texas Instruments has little chips in all our car keys, which is brilliant, cuz calculators are a ship that's long sailed.

But all these little computers don't think like I think, so all this "thinking for me" that overwhelms them and makes them crash isn't very helpful at all.  Today I locked myself out of my car (I am always doing that) and did my keys think about how they could assist me with solving this problem?  No, of course not, they don't think.  So what I want to know is, what happens when the chip breaks?  Could I have my key, more or less intact, and it wouldn't start my car because a chip I didn't even know was in there broke?  So thanks a lot computers, you're super helpful.  Artificial Intelligence is only a step away.

All this to say, I do NOT understand what this lady has against space travel.  Where would we be without fire (which was given to us inadvertantly by the aliens that built the pyramids, who left some here, thank goodness.)