№ 85.Habits of the Mind (2)

Anxious. Here's a balm: "Making Paper Boats with Papa".

Open publication - Free publishing

№ 84. Habits of the Mind

It's the climate change on a planetary scale, for starters. Then there are the rabid monsoons. Did we mention the floods thick with our sewage and rich with our possessions? How about the waste segregation floating on our dead rivers?

It's all the irresponsibility and ineptness in this vast urban sinkhole.

"Anxiety: a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease
about something with an uncertain outcome."---David Mansaray

And talk about another habit of the mind---anxiety. Anxiety because of and amidst all of these.

Thankfully, it's one that can be cured by a simple smack or noogie. Thankfully, the cure is mainly mental not planetary. But if you wish, it could also be physical, a break from an unproductive helplessness that's fast becoming a pattern, or worse, a cycle. It's this loopy possibility that can be self-defeating.

Daniel Smith says, "Anxious thoughts — the what-if’s, the should-have-been’s, the never-will-be’s — are dramatic thoughts. They are compelling thoughts. They are thoughts that have no compunction about seizing you by your lapels and shouting, “Listen to me! Believe me!” So we listen, and believe, without realizing that by doing so we are stepping onto a closed loop, a set of mental tracks that circle endlessly and get us nowhere. This makes the anxious habit very hard to break. Over time those mental tracks deepen and become hardened ruts. Our thoughts slip into grooves of illogic, hypervigilance and catastrophe."

So here's a smack! Figurative, for now.

--------

"One day last year, I called my brother Scott in a state of agitation, self-hatred and incipient despair. Scott was at work and short on time. I got straight to the point. 'I’m in a state of agitation, self-hatred and incipient despair!' I cried.

'Tell me more,' Scott said. 'What is it?'

'I'm anxious — again! I’m anxious day and night. I wake up anxious and I go to bed anxious. I’m a total wreck. And I’m not doing anything to help myself! I know what helps and I’m not doing it! What’s wrong with me? Why am I not doing the things I know full well will make me feel better?'

Vice Grips and Some Such

'Oh,' Scott said. 'That’s an easy one. It’s because you’re an idiot.' Then he said he’d call me after work. (NYT Opinionator)

№ 83. 18th Century Social Network

Ideas travel. But there should be a feedback mechanism and a network to link the ideas, their creators and other creators.

Social networks, in all their primitive forms, proved to be the tides that brought foam and freedom, novelty, variety and dissent to distant lands.

It's interesting to actually see, not with our mind's eye, how the light that burned in the minds of these great thinkers spread across physical spaces.

Thanks Stanford.

 

№ 82.God of Carnage

"In America, it has been, for so long now, the belief that guns designed to kill people indifferently and in great numbers can be widely available and not have it end with people being killed, indifferently and in great numbers." The New Yorker

 

All huddle in midnight vigil.
They wait for paid violence to awake.

Dark menace finally rises up
To uncoil out of the silver pages.

Then bullets litter the air.
Special effects, they think.

Fire metals pierce
Flesh, bones and fiction.

Cellphones ring unanswered
In the pockets of dead children.

Popcorn kernels litter the exodus
While Gotham reels empty after the carnage.

Pilgrims welcome the refuge outside.
Almighty Bruce redeems his masses back to reality.

Bento Box: 

"It is the implicit bargain every moviegoer makes. You buy your ticket, you go into an auditorium full of people you don't know, you look toward the front of the room, the lights go down -- and in the darkness, you are safe. The movies promise us a happy ending, a return to the familiar world we know" (When it's not 'only a movie'). 

Alas, no more of that fiction beyond the film.

№ 81.Animated Star Trek

Hmmm. It's been a while.

I haven't heard of any new trek series being lined up in WIP (work in process). Hurry up Hollywood! This will soon get stale.

 

№ 80. Infinite Loops & Legos

We wake;
We conceive.

We wonder,
So we begin.

We create
And realize.

We see;
We marvel.

We pine;
Hope wanes.

We regret
But resolve:

We build;
Hence, we destroy.

№ 79. The Monsters & Me

I saw, heard and smelled the trails of many monsters. They weren't cute, funny, and sterile. They never appeared or pretended to be the almost safe cartoons that Disney or Nickelodeon feed the kids.

The monsters were real.

Mask of Reason

№ 78. Sacraments

There are many sacrifices I have to endure in Manila. 

 

Pasig

One daily grinding thorn is commuting--- either by public transportation or private car. Long lines, traffic, heat, pollution, noise and all urban blight seem to converge like LDL or bad cholesterol in the arteries of the city.

It helps that someone---yes, a priest---had the vision to write about the art, he calls it "sacrament", of waiting.

That dirty word, again. "Sacrament" has been so burdened with all layers of Catholic meanings for me that it's become almost sinister. I hesitate to use it.

But, admittedly, he nailed the insights in the experience and wrote damn well about it. So I must share the space with those nuggets about the art (for us secular folks) of waiting.

"Waiting is a mystery - a natural sacrament of life - there is a meaning hidden in all the times we have to wait. It must be an important mystery because there is so much waiting in our lives. 

 

Everyday is filled with those little moments of waiting (testing our patience and our nerves, schooling us in self-control). We wait for meals to be served, for a letter to arrive, for a friend to call or show up for a date. We wait in line at cinemas and theaters, concerts and circuses. Our airline terminals, railway stations and bus depots are great temples of waiting filled with men and women who wait in joy for the arrival of a loved one - or wait in sadness to say goodbye and give the last wave of hand. We wait for springs to come - or autumn - for the rains to begin and stop. And we wait for ourselves to grow from childhood to maturity. We wait for those inner voices that tell us when we are ready for the next stop." (Son of the Prodigal).