If you can truthfully admit that you live a lie then your living in itself a truth. What is each of us but a facade of normality, interspersed with leaps of considered insanity. But to be free of all societal pressure and live on a self-governed code is itself suicide as others can not allow it. No, the only way is to skirt the border between the forces however close or far they may be apart. Live as much as you can live. Play as much as you can play. Modifying your life to reach out and embrace that insanity, absorb it, master it and let it tempt your mind. Let yourself taste a freedom yet still adhere to a standard under which we lie.

Yep, too much Dexter.

I think humanity has used our world resources as I tend to use my toothpaste.  When the tube is full, I always make sure i have a full length of toothpaste on the brush.  I don’t think that i’m going to run out.  And for a while it appears as though I’m not going to.  Depletion just doesn’t seem to occur for that initial 1/3 of a tube.  Then i start to notice that it is actually decreasing in volume, but hey, the toothpaste is still half full.  Do i change my use? No, of course not!

Pretty soon i’m down to the last 1/4 of a tube, but think ahh it’s no big deal, i can just go out an buy another tube of toothpaste, so continue using it as i usually do.  But then that fatefull day comes when i squeeze and nothing comes out…at first i panic as I didn’t go out and actually buy another tube as that would have taken foresight on my behalf.  But then upon further inspection i realize “oh hey, if i start from the bottom and squeeze up tightly i still have some left!” So i do that, and from that day on i make sure to use only the tiniest bit of toothpaste in each brush. I take what i would have normally used up in 2 days and make it last for 2 weeks but ultimately it still runs out.

I could have made it last 100 times as long if only i had metered out that amount for the entire tube, but that’s just not how we view things is it?

Fortunately for me i the real final few days i managed to scam a new tube off my dad when i was home…all I can say is that I hope we colonize the moon or mars soon.

And that my friends, is how I’ve simplified our global environmental crisis into one simple toothpaste metaphor.

I found these little thoughts in my gmail drafts while I was cleaning it out last week, and didn’t want to just throw it out so thought I’d toss it on here incase it actually means something to someone! I don’t really remember writing it, but I guess I did when I was back in my deep thought blog writing stage many many moons ago hahaha

Anyways, enjoy!

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What is it to try and change a man?  Is it to make them see what blinds them?  Or perhaps to the close doors to where their dreams lie? How can you ask someone to follow a path of your desire without running  the risk of tearing down a bridge to what they might truly desire most?

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Reality is a most harsh creature, one in which we’ve evolved a seeming necessity of savagery for survival.  Why is that? Ingrained in each of us is the capability for such a range of character.  I’d like to think that we’ve progressed into civility, but that seems so misconstrued upon further reflection.  Look at the natural world around us.

There has been a shift.  In the animal world, creatures fight others of their own kind for territorial reasons.  An obvious comparison is made with humans today.  But in addition to that, there is also jealousy, greed, hate, religion, ignorance, manipulation; all these things strike against making a case for civility.  A so-called self aware mind has made us so self-important that we forget, we lose our connection to those around us, though not just humans, but to all creatures.  We are poisoning our world, destroying hundreds of millions of years of precious evolution.  That preciousness that has led to our own self being, my own self being.  The mere thought of the countless improbabilities to bring any single life into being is astounding, yet we ferociously and consistently rip it out.  So can you say we are really the rulers of the earth or just a mere obscene mistake?

But what of our redeeming characteristics.  Surely they must construct some support for which to lay our tired souls.  What is it that may separate us from other creatures.  It is hard to find an attribute that we have that cannot be found in our animal kin.  What differs is that though examples of our kinder emotions can be found scattered in various amounts among different species, it is within us that all of them lie, even if not shown by everyone.  And not only that, but our minds have allowed us to expand, to evolve our benevolent traits to a higher level.  We have raised our character to a higher plane of existence.

We can hope for the good, for the kind, for the heart to guide us, but is this a false premise? Perhaps, but anything less than that hope would place our kind into a spiral of despair.  So I know I for one will maintain my ideological desires for the forward progress of civility and thought for our species.

There was always a reason I didn’t join facebook until a year later than everyone else.  It was something in the concept of it: the accruing of friends solely to have friends, a subtle expectation to be in constant contact with those people on your list and lastly having people from yesteryear that you really don’t care for anymore contacting you.

Now many arguments can be made for facebook, and some I do support.  I personally used facebook throughout my travels abroad for an easy way to keep in touch with people I met as a simple e-mail address exchange provides all the information you could want about a person and profiles are very helpful in helping my now old mind to remember meeting the person.

I came across an article on one of the (nerd/tech) sites I visit on a regular basis  with an article written by one of the editors that argues against facebook.  His sentiments mirror my own in regards to friendship.  Here’s a small snippet with the link to the entire article following:

Friendship is not based on constant contact and interaction. Friendship is based on the emotional attachment that we have to other individuals, and if this emotional attachment is real, it doesn’t become weaker over time, no matter how rarely you see that person. I have a friend that I’ve known since I was three years old and sometimes we go two or three years without seeing each other. Does that mean that our friendship is weak? No. Does that mean that I should register on Facebook and add him to my friends list so that we can communicate more often? No. It means that our friendship is strong enough that if we get together after three years of not seeing each other, it feels as if we’d seen each other only yesterday.

You can find the rest of the article here.

If you ascribe to god a multitude of seemingly inconsequential and unconnected events, belie your own common rational thinking by rendering unto them a collection of conclusive thoughts in quiet self-justification, then what is attained? Would it not be solely a dark veil between you and that of rational thought? Can one so lost be found again? Could the mere thought of such a meaning not be rationalized to that of superstitious folly? Is it not possible that your belief in the deceiving power of existentialist thought is meant only to deceive yourself? Failure to understand, no rather, failure to truly need and desire to understand is not failing only yourself but life in its beautiful entirety.
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It takes but a mere attentiveness to the world around us, in which we breath, we listen, we dream, we live, to perceive the most desirable pleasures we are sorely denied. Those most selfish pleasures of thoughts without influence, without subjugation to the whims and wants of those who shape our world. Through mediums both prevalent and minute, the permeation of control saturates our very existence. Free thought? A fanciful idea. However that pleasant notion of uninfluenced perception and unbiased opinions forever escapes our utopic fantasies. As masses we mold our minds to fit the perfect die already set, faults certainly cast away. Most accept this reality. Upon few dawns the enlightenment of our endless cycle, but nearly always after their time has set. Their struggles and defiance swiftly suppressed, extinguished into an oblivion. We hope endlessly for those even lesser precious few who can break through, alighting our world with renewed life and thought, procuring within us a spirit and passion that cannot be crushed. And so we wait, patiently acting as we are bidden, puppets to others as much as they are puppets to us.

I thought this was pretty much bang on!

If that’s true then I’ve just written an encyclopedia!

I’ve finally got my pictures from Greece uploaded and commented.  You can check them out here or on the link on the right hand sidebar.  I would suggest you actually open up the pictures rather than looking at the thumbnails as I’ve actually commented on the pictures in very large text above each image.  I didn’t end up taking any pictures during our stay on Mykonos so no pictures from there unfortunately, but I do have a fun story to tell once I get some time to write about it.

Enjoy!

I just finished reading a book the other day while traveling here in Europe.  It is probably one of the most incredible stories I’ve ever read.  The book is entitled:

A Long Way Gone: memoirs of a boy soldier 
By: Ismael Beah

All I can say is wow…

Here’s the description from the official site:

A gripping story of a child’s journey through hell and back.

There may be as many as 300,000 child soldiers, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s, in more than fifty conflicts around the world. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them. He is one of the first to tell his story in his own words.

In A LONG WAY GONE, Beah, now twenty-six years old, tells a riveting story. At the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. Eventually released by the army and sent to a UNICEF rehabilitation center, he struggled to regain his humanity and to reenter the world of civilians, who viewed him with fear and suspicion. This is, at last, a story of redemption and hope.

If I can recommend one book to you this year, it is this one.

I’m headed off to a cottage for the rest of this week and then hiking in Algonquin next week! So I’ll update once I get back, and hopefully with stories of me beating up a bear and then taking all his money!

Until then…

Check out this interview with John Stewart.  It’s just a little clip, but the full thing will be up soon and I’ll post that as soon as it does.  Check it out here:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04272007/profile…

Enjoy!