What came first: futility or acceptance?
‘Dealing with scarcity through acquisition’ would be a subset of ‘changing your environment’ aka ‘fixing things’…
I see an opposite human impulse exhibited in some, not all, of my beach buddies in Bali (come from faraway places like Sumatra to find opportunity that’s rarely here), namely: acceptance of the way things are, as they are. I think of them without judgement as the contentment junkies. There is a lot to be said for acceptance, especially in certain situations, even if you are accused of ‘giving up’.
There is a case to be made too for keeping alive an ability in yourself to try to change things, when things can be improved in environments conducive to to it. A case for being honest with yourself as to the place and time you are lucky enough to inhabit, a place of less futility than your laziness might prefer….
nice quote
Ms. DeMartini fell in love with the place. She enjoys floating in the pool at 11 PM
and looking at the stars through the palm trees. “I’m finding out more
about what I want and what I think,” she said. “And I want less than I
imagined. The desert is great for simplifying your life.”
Oh sorry, I read that ‘dessert’!
Douglas Hofstadter
“I am a mirage that perceives itself.â€
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/play.html?pg=3
better inconveniences
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
 – Thomas Jefferson
new wor(l)ds
I was thinking that there are 3 overt actions you perform online: 1) click on a link 2) search 3) email. Now all 3 actions have as a by-product (ideally unobtrusive) ads that invite you to become a consumer of something. This filling in of the internet with a commercial overlay that works without alienating potential customers, or I should say creating customers out of everyone, where before there were only surfers, is probably on par with the invention of goddamn electricity.
And the reason it works is the targeting: intelligent ads. In fact I think a new word is needed. An ad was something that bugged me unless I needed the product, in which case it aided my decision. There is an organic quality (jargon I know!) to these chunks of info that *probably* have some connection to me based on one of my 3 basic activities listed above.
It feels like walking through dense forest and having fruit present itself as I go. It may not all be ripe or edible but it does not obstruct my way and some of it is perfect for me, or may be when it ripens. Before there was a new jungle, interesting and overwhelming. That is still there, but now there’s sustenance too…surf-fruit? Net-fruit?
Bali breakfast
At 11 AM he is sipping red wine and smoking a cigarette. His salad comes. Of course he’s speaking French. Beer at 11 is Australian. Red wine before noon is French.
entry visas
We invited our buddy R to stop by our place any time. But he mentioned to Dian how awkward he’d feel explaining to the ‘guards’ at the Jayakarta front gate that his friends lived at Jayakarta and that he’d like to pop by. That really, he’s not a terrorist and really, even though he owns next-to-nothing, that he won’t go snooping around and violate the sacred space of the people with white skin.
I thought for about a second that maybe giving him a note from me would get him ‘in’ — of course it’s crazy, how demeaning. Maybe I’ll write a note and silkscreen it on to T-shirts and give them away to all my Indonesian buddies from the beach.
Bali: reason #1
Let’s face it: the best reason to come to Bali is to see all all dogs riding on motorcycles as people bring them to the beach to run around. Many of them sit on the foot platform on the 125 cc motorcycles, sometimes in baskets; on the larger bikes dogs are on towels placed on the gas tank, or standing with front paws on the handlbars. You could do a book of photographs of the creative ways that even large dogs are brought to the beach for their sunset leg-lifts.