The Old Young Hillary

Here's an interesting article on Hillary Clinton. It's interesting to note that there is a common set of questions, thoughts, and experiences that every individual- from me to you to Mrs. Hillary Rodham Clinton- go through in life. It's comforting on the one hand because maybe that is what life is about- each individual getting a chance to search within and around themselves for answers and meaning before passing away into oblivion (or whatever).

On the other hand, one look at the present (perhaps the Pres-id-ent) Hillary Clinton has me hoping that that is where our similarities end. See what politics has done to her. Already, in the letter, I could sense a load of negativity and anger- although I guess it's not fair to judge from the excerpts in the article. And life hasn't exactly been kind to her what with her being cheated on in front of the whole world. It's frightening to see what can happen to a person who used to have the same thoughts and questions and desires as you.

I was just thinking: Harry had the same thoughts about Voldemort. Ooh, Harry Potter parallels, how illuminating!

The Connery Effect

I just saw my first Indiana Jones movie- The Last Crusade. (Yes, that is the 3rd installment of the franchise.) Two thumbs up for its hilarious antics, great, comical action sequence from the very beginning, good one-liners, and of course, for the multiple demonstrations of the Connery Effect. For instance:

"Did I ever tell you to do your homework, go to bed, wash behind your ears? I gave you privacy! I taught you...SHELF-RELIANCE!"

Hehe. Kinda takes away from the heat of the moment when all your S's come out sounding like SH's.

The Limited Power of Analogies

Analogies can only take your argument so far. Actually, what I want to say is, analogies don't further argument, they merely serve to convey ideas. In other words, analogies contribute nothing to the truth value of a statement or an idea; they can only aid in the understanding of it. For instance, I found the following excerpt from an article in the Times about abstinence:

“You have to look at why sex was created,” Eric Love, the director of the East Texas Abstinence Program, which runs Virginity Rules, said one day, the sounds of Christian contemporary music humming faintly in his Longview office. “Sex was designed to bond two people together.”

To make the point, Mr. Love grabbed a tape dispenser and snapped off two fresh pieces. He slapped them to his filing cabinet and the floor; they trapped dirt, lint, a small metal bolt. “Now when it comes time for them to get married, the marriage pulls apart so easily,” he said, trying to unite the grimy strips. “Why? Because they gave the stickiness away.”

Great analogy, by all means, Mr. Love. Not perfect, but I see what he's trying to say. But I just hope people don't accept his view as the "correct" view solely based on the quality of his analogy. Like some kinds of tape don't ever lose their stickiness, Mr. Love, hehe.

The set of analogies that can be made is a lot bigger than the set of analogies that should be made.

The Importance of Proofreading and Chicken Tales

Yesterday, I was translating a portion of the book talking about the basis of Halakha (Jewish religious law). The story told was about how one year, the eve of "Paque" fell on the Sabbath, and so they had to figure out whether "Paque" took precedence over the Sabbath.

Today, after a good night's sleep, I realized that I translated "Paque" as Easter instead of Passover. Which doesn't sound like a big deal, really until you realize that Jews definitely don't celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Sometimes you forget that Easter wasn't originally a day for celebrating bunnies and going on Easter egg hunts.

Little fact about eggs: The largest chicken egg was over 12 inches around the long axis, and 9 around the short. That poor chicken. There are some other interesting facts about chickens on this page. Here is a particularly funny chicken story:

[UPI, Cairo, Egypt, 31 Aug. 1995] - Six people drowned Monday while trying to rescue a chicken that had fallen into a well in southern Egypt. An 18 year old farmer was the first to descend into the 60-foot well. He drowned, apparently after an undercurrent in the water pulled him down, police said. His sister and two brothers, none of whom could swim well, went in one by one to help him, but also drowned. Two elderly farmers then came to help, but they apparently were pulled by the same undercurrent. The bodies of the six were later pulled out of the well in the village of Nazlat Imara, 240 miles south of Cairo. The chicken was also pulled out. It survived.

I think the article forgot to mention that the chicken laid gold eggs.

Listening To...

Current music favorites:

1. Aventura- great music to cook to!

2. Amelie soundtrack- puts me in another country, another century; listen for:
(a) bicycle wheel at the end of "La Dispute"
(b) the tinkly musical box music that sneaks in about 2 minutes into "Soir de fete"- it took me forever to find which song that was in! The transition is absolutely seamless! It's my favorite part of the whole soundtrack.

3. Pink Floyd (just...great; Comfortably Numb, Coming back to life, Another Brick in the Wall. Listen to that guitar wail!)

4. Arcade Fire- good indie rock; Crown of Love is my favorite; Neighborhood 1 and 4, Intervention...I love the Canadian radio host's voice at the end: "If that doesn't git yeh man, if that doesn't git yeh somewhere spaycial!...Whhhhwww...feel sorry for yeh"

Dreams

There's an interesting article on dreams in this week's Science Times. I've always been fascinated by this subject because for one, it's an interesting phenomenon in itself (is it really just evolutionary spandrel or did it evolve of its own accord? What are it's (dis)advantages? How does it happen? Well, definitely, in order to know more about dreaming, we have to know more about consciousness and memory), and also because I have a better ability than most to recall my dreams, and/or I have more vivid dreams in general, and so I guess I dwell on them more (Even though Dumbledore says "it does not do to dwell on dreams." Of course, he was talking about a different sort of dreaming...).

Upon waking up after a vivid dream, I almost always try to figure out why I dreamed about this happening, and why this person popped up in my dream because it's my firm belief that there's a logical explanation for each event/person involved, at least in my case. I don't not believe in prophetic dreams (especially after hearing Jin's stories), but I know I'm no psychic, nor am I magically connected to a certain Dark Wizard, and I definitely don't believe in all that Freudian nonsense about daughters wanting their fathers and whatnot.

What I've learned from analyzing my own dreams is that the basic process is: my mind takes a kernel of reality (whether it is a particularly intense emotion, eg: desire or guilt, or a person that I thought of in passing the day before- the kernel is almost always taken from the reality of the day before- and promptly forgot about) and projects it into a full-blown movie using characters/events/places/feelings from my past experiences and thoughts, that I suppose get all jumbled up in my brain as it relaxes into sleep-mode. It's like a kernel of reality getting tossed into a box of old photos, my memory file, and shaken up like a Wendy's salad. Of course, this describes the process of only one kind of dream. I have others that stay more in the current, like when I used to work at the bookstore full-time, once, I dreamed that I came down the escalator with a pile of books in my arms to find three of my co-workers at the info-desk trying to juggle pencils on their noses. Wait, was that a dream? Hm...

So, anyway, in this sense, dreams are like myths; they are "truth-bearing tales," always containing a kernel of truth dressed up in nonsense from your jumbled memory.

Some observations about my dreams:

Whenever I make a big move, I constantly dream about the people I leave behind for at least the first couple weeks. Also, childhood friends crop up in my dreams more often than usual. This time around, I haven't even moved yet (about 2 months to go), but those dreams have already begun.

Eating a lot of food right before falling asleep gives me ultra-vivid, action-packed dreams. Garfield had it right: "No more pizza after midnight!" (But the cause can't be a surplus of glucose in the brain because the food hasn't been processed yet...something about your digestive system being seriously active? I dunno...)

Some people are more prone to flying dreams than others. I'm in the latter category.

In high school, I experimented with this deep-breathing technique right before falling asleep, and all my dreams were extremely serene and happy. Like I would dream about stretching on a sandy beach, blue skies, ocean, gulls in the distance, the works.

A lot of aspects about dreams and dreaming (like, why I dream about the people I left behind) is pretty easily explained- elementary, my dear Watson- but on the whole, the phenomenon is still shrouded in mystery because it delves into the field of consciousness and memory, which we really don't know much about yet, though that's slowly changing.

Sympathy for Raskolnikov

Have you ever felt so angry at someone that you just want to strangle them? Like, really, physically beat the shit out of them? I don't remember much about the book "Crime & Punishment," which I read in high school English class, which was (scarily enough) years ago, but I do remember feeling more than a bit sympathetic for the main character.

With that said, something that I don't understand- and maybe it's not fair to say this, but here goes: one thing I don't understand is when black people are racist. Of all people, I think they should understand what it's like to be treated as inferiors just because of the way they look. Right?? But even as I was wondering about this illogism (what? It's a word in French!), I realized that that's exactly the problem- a black person who treats Muslims and Asians like shit, calling them damn foreigners, saying "I hate it when they come in speaking 'their language' (when they are clearly speaking English), yelling "go back to fucking Korea", or acting as if we can't operate a simple computerized sandwich ordering machine when it's clear that it's the machine that is broken, not the orderer's brain, a person like that, no matter their color, is clearly not a rational being. One might even call them crazy, or fucked in the head, and there are certainly enough of those kinds of people here in Philly, so I guess it makes sense that we have so many of these incidents...

Point being, racism, bigotry, bias, whatever, is inherently unreasonable, and although this point is not meant to help victims of that sort of injustice feel much better, at least now we know it's because they're not as smart as us. But then again, does "more rational" mean "smarter"? I can see now why education is so important for society, and this is a point reiterated over and over and over again (I guess that's why they call it a "theme") in the book, "Three Cups of Tea": educated minds incite rational behavior. It may not be a cure to the world's peace problems, but a person who is taught to think logically from a young age is less likely to believe baseless statements like "All Muslims are terrorists" or "Americans are the devil incarnate" or "Iraq is the axis of ev..." for some reason, I just lost the desire to finish this sentence.