I've had a very inspiring weekend so far. It may not look that way if you walk in and see me sitting here drumming my fingers at the student help desk, but it's for real.
It started last night, when against my "better" judgment I decided to take a break from the steady stream of tepid tasks I was working on and draw myself a hot bath. I don't wait for the tub to fill; I got in an let the liquid heat slowly envelop my aching body (my back right now has a terrible knot, one of those long stringy ones that sort of crackle and crunch under the fingers - appetizing I know), and I stared at the ceiling. Because my mind's engine had been running all day, it wasn't comfortable just shutting down. So I forced myself to do a little dreaming.
Yes, I forced myself. This is because my mind has been for the past few years VERY unimaginative as I have spent so much time worrying about bills, hassles with my car, etc that the poor thing has diligently reconfigured itself to optimize for getting shit done. And it has done pretty well at that, actually. The unfortunate consequence, which proceeded for along time before I even recognized it, is that dreaming - awake dreaming, dreaming about the future, counterfactual exploration, the like - just doesn't take place any more. If I find myself running a simulation in my head, it's not about me and my future exploits of the potentialities of artistic expression, or me gallivanting about the world with the beautiful exotic women I meet along the way, or exploring the universe in a little red spaceship, but most likely about a dozen different ways I could phrase a call to a potential customer, or a consideration of the best way I can sequence the wearing of my various pairs of shoes so they stay above the requisite evaporation rate to avoid smelly feet, or other such mundane things.
So there I was, forcing myself to imagine doing whatever I could possibly want to do, and finding it exceedingly difficult. My mind is actually just kind of blank in that regard. Being a student of Terry Gross I started asking myself questions: "what am I doing all this for?" Nothing. What did I used to want to do before I became an adult in the worst kind of way? Words, just phrases: "well, I guess I really liked traveling when I did a small part of that". Being also a student of Tony Robbins, "what would I do if I knew I couldn't fail?". No answer. Rephrasing a bit, "Okay, assume I've made my millions. I don't have to work for money, at all. What do I do right now?"
Bingo! That did it - The ideas started to flow. I'd get up, dry off, pack some clothes, and hop on a plane. I'd go to San Francisco, to visit some friends of mine I haven't seen in a while. I'd go home to visit my mother and spend time helping her with the perpetual upgrades she is making to her home. I'd visit my dog. I'd find a camp for Burning Man and throw myself into preparations for the best camp ever made. I'd find a dj and have them teach me their skills. I would tour the world and see firsthand the wonder and suffering of its residents and their circumstances. I discovered a strong desire to visit the war-torn places I hear about in the news every day, and just do whatever I possibly could to help out, on the ground, face to face with whomever needed help - of any kind. The desire was to see the horror with my own eyes. Mostly I would go around removing the layers of abstraction between me and the people I care about, which is, I guess, everyone. I would definitely learn to surf. I would most definitely live on the BioTour bus and do what I could with them to swing the 2008 election away from the pull of evil.
Then I came back to the tub. Me laying there, in lukewarm water (which, contrary to popular belief, is not he way I like it), my back aching, my circumstances in flux because of my tight financial situation, worrying about loan payments every month, working on other people's projects for the privilege of staying solvent, and I said "fuck this". I decided, once again, to get remarkably rich so I could do all the things I want to do with my life. I spent the next eight hours, all through the night, alternating between reading Paul Graham's website, the Y Combinator website, and researching random topics that grabbed my fancy on the internet, writing in my blog (aqui), and walking back and forth around the block in the neighborhood I live in. Finally, quite late in the morning, I fell asleep.
This morning I woke up, walked out into the springlike weather, breathed in the sun and felt the warmth of the air on my face, went the grocery store and bought a ton of great food, slapped it all into the fridge as fast as I could, made two turkey sandwiches, grabbed and apple, and went out to see an old, crumbling house in Newton, MA. There I met up with a girl who's also a Burner, who has a deal to rent the house very inexpensively. We're thinking of putting together a co-op of like-minded youngsters. Talking about the possibilities and meeting the other potentials who came by to see the place was wonderfully inspiring and exciting.
Then I raced here to work and spent my first half-hour idly scrolling around in Google maps, tracing the coastline of Hawaii and Peru and exploring the craggy peaks of Iceland and Alaska. I flew over Tehran a little bit, and gazed at the African plain. Then I decided it would be better to do this exploring with Google earth, so I downloaded it. I discovered that Google earth now has a sky view. And just like the map view you can zoom and zoom and zoom. If you thought the world was a big place, try to universe. Holy shit.
Being the renaissance man that I am (nyuk nyuk) I am aware that some parts of the sky have had much greater resolution photos taken than others, and I wanted to find them. By repeated random sampling, I found one. It's at 17h 59m; -29° 12' 36". To get there just turn on the grid, from the view menu. For those of you too lazy to do the homework, it's a shot toward the middle portion of our galaxy, showing a region of an incredible density of stars.
That's 17h 59m; -29° 12' 36". If that doesn't mean anything to you, don't worry (I have no idea what it means either). Just open Google Earth, go to the sky view, turn on the grid, and the numbers will make sense.
For those of you actually doing the homework, go there and look at that, and then tell me that's not one of the most beautiful things you've ever seen.
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