Day 3: Crowds, more isolating than isolation?

So after 3 minutes of nothing, I was reminded of this last Sunday. My family and I went to the Washington State Fair in Puyallup (If you’re not from around here you’re probably saying that last word wrong in your head). For the last several hours, I wanted to get a break from people as I’d been people-ing all day, which for an introvert is exhausting. But to reference myself from a few seconds ago I was at a state fair in Pyoo-WAHL-up. If you have never been to a state fair, let me enlighten you: the only way to get away from people in a state fair is in a bathroom stall or disguising yourself as an adult pig (no one ever goes to see the adult pigs).

So because I didn’t want to spend the next few hours in the bathroom or in a pigpen, I decided to simply walk around the fair without talking to people. This proved surprisingly restful. There was something pleasantly isolating about ignoring hundreds and hundreds of people, as if I was practicing not caring so much what people thought of me and instead just living my life.

In conclusion, I have decided that while I probably still prefer pure isolation as a means of recovering people-energy (which sounds serial killer-esque, but don’t judge me), wandering through a crowd of people in which I know (statistically speaking) no one is perhaps a second option.

Day 2: Trails, and what they say about the meaning of life.

I did my 2 minutes of nothing while taking a break on a hike this last Saturday. I walked out in front of the group I was with and then slipped off the trail to find a quiet spot to sit. While I sat next to the river, I started thinking about the trail I had just been walking on.

The trail was wide and well-maintained; clearly designed for lots of traffic, and I had seen lots of people while walking. I couldn’t help but wonder about the purpose of it. Here I and many others were out walking on it, but why? Why was I out on this trail? The best answer I could come up with (aside from “my family made me come”) was that at least for me, and I think a lot of people who hike on trails, we enjoy experiencing nature. We like to go out and see what things were like before we (the humans) made them not that way, and trails allow us to make this experience more accessible. (Unfortunately, in doing so we make it less like what we’re wanting it to be: a world devoid of ourselves, but we’ll get back to that).

Broadly speaking, regardless of our individual motivation for wanting trails, as a species this desire becomes inherently selfish. We’re putting these things out there because we (as humanity, not individuals) want to experience nature. Now, I don’t believe that we’re doing the woods any favors by traipsing through it and by making trails so that more and more people can more easily traipse through it. And if we take this to the furthest extent, we would make wide, easy trails to and through everything, all around the world until nowhere was too remote (and unfortunately nowhere remote enough to really fulfil what I view as the purpose of trails in the first place: seeing something without human effects).

So trails are selfish and for our benefit, not the woods’. The most unselfish thing to do, then, would be to make no trails and to never venture into the remaining areas of wild ever again; let them grow up and forget we were there. Give back more and more land to nature until the entire planet is basically all returned to its natural habitat (yeah I know, this would take thousands of years, if not millions).

These two extreme viewpoints on a strange non-issue bring up an interesting question about the meaning of life that I have no answer for at the moment: what is the goal of our existence? Is it for personal gain? In which case we should make trails everywhere so everyone can go everywhere and experience everything? Or is it for the continued existence of the species and life itself? In which case we should stop making trails and stop impacting the environment as much as we do?

Just something to ponder the next time you take some time to do nothing.

Let me know if you come up with any good thoughts.

The new plan is: nothing. But like, intentionally.

I got bored with the series I was doing, as I’m sure anyone who read more than a few seconds of any of those posts did too. My attention span is simply not long enough to keep that up. Which, oddly enough, is the set up for my next set of blog posts.

I am really bad at doing nothing.

Really bad.

I tend to derive my self-worth from accomplishment, so doing nothing to me feels like wasted time. As a result, I am always doing something, often more than one thing. I’m watching a tv show, listening to a podcast, playing a game on my phone, reading a book, listening to a book, doing a chore around the house, planning a hypothetical trip to the U.K., playing a game on my computer, doing homework, doing work for a job, doing work for no reason whatsoever, etc. You get the idea.

This can result in me freaking out when I’m not being productive enough, not accomplishing something efficiently enough, or not actively doing something at any given moment.

So, in an effort to combat this, I have decided that every day I am going to dedicate an increasing amount of time to absolutely nothing. I’m going to set an alarm, and then do nothing. I won’t use my phone, I won’t play music or a podcast or an audiobook. I won’t work on anything at all. I will simply sit and think. (And then reflect on my thoughts from this nothing time).

So I now begin with:

Day 1

(1 minute)

I mostly just thought about my reasons for doing this weird experiment, which you already heard about above, but I also thought about an interaction I overheard my mother having on the phone earlier this evening. She had decided to “brag on me” to the person on the other end of the line. She told how I had played music with her for the kids at her school. She told how I had gone to the store and gotten items off her shopping list for her. She told how I had cleaned up the kitchen without being asked. As she was describing all these great and wonderful things I had done, I couldn’t help but think that I had done only the bare minimum.

Everything I had done that my mom felt the need to brag on me for doing seems to me like the basic contributions I should be making as an adult living in this house.

It makes me think about how men aren’t expected to help with household chores like making food or cleaning up after meals. It makes me think about how as the youngest child I can get away with not doing my share because everyone still looks at me as a kid and I let them do that because it suits me. But most of all, it makes me think about how rarely I help out if me showing a *small* amount of initiative is considered brag-worthy material.

So the takeaway from today’s moment of nothing is: act on my convictions. If I think that men should help women with the chores around the house, then I need to start doing chores around the house. If I think that being the youngest doesn’t give me special rights to do nothing more often, then I need to start doing things and being proactive with helping out. If I think that I’ve been too selfish about my time and doing only things that I want to do, then I need to start finding out how I can help the people around me and then following through by actually helping them.

If I am willing to have an opinion on something, then I better also be willing to show actual, actionable support for it.

How is…

Today’s questions seem to be dominated by how things are made. So prepare to learn a lot about manufacturing processes. Riveting, I know.

The First: how is almond milk made?

I’ll give you a quick recipe:

1 large amount of almonds

1 large amount of water

Combine both ingredients in a blender. Blend. Get rid of the almond pulp. Pour over cereal.

The Second: how is john mccain doing?

Unfortunately he isn’t.

The Third: how is plastic made?

This is super chemical and complex but here goes.

They get their raw materials by “cracking” (which is a way of separating out fossil fuels from each other).

Next they take these ingredients (hydrocarbons) and use awesome chemistry magic to make monomers.

The monomers are then chemically attached together in long strings (polymers) which leaves you with polymer resin.

Polymer resin can then be turned into plastic stuff through a few more processes.

Yeah I know I skipped basically everything in that explanation and you now know only the different states that plastic ends up in during production, but if you really want to know, check out this article. Super helpful.

The Fourth: how is vinegar made?

As best as I can tell, vinegar is sour alcohol? Which sounds horrible. Essentially, you take your alcohol (ethanol) and let it ferment. You can add something called “mother of vinegar” which is a bacteria that makes it ferment faster, if you want, but in the end, you just want your ethanol to become acetic acid, which, in the right amounts of water, is your vinegar.

The Fifth: how is hawaii doing?

Unfortunately, about as well as the rest of the country.

The Sixth: how is hepatitis c transmitted?

Contaminated blood. Often through drug injections, disreputable tattoo places, and sex.

Gross.

Can we move on please?

The Seventh: how is honey made?

Okay much better. Honey is much more pleasant.

The pleasant bees get pleasant nectar from pleasant flowers and they eat it??? Apparently honey goes from nectar to honey by being digested. Repeatedly. By bees.

Slightly less pleasant than I was expecting.

The Eighth: how is babby formed?

So there’s actually a bit of a story for this one, believe it or not. This is based on a Yahoo Answers question that a bunch of people made fun of, in which someone asked this question: “how is babby formed?”

Like many interesting and dumb things on the internet, this became a meme, based on this photo, which was then photoshopped onto all sorts of things. Such as this monstrosity.

The Ninth: how is glass made?

I think we all kind of inherently know the answer to this, or maybe that’s just me.

Without any googling, I’m pretty sure you just heat up sand really hot.

After some googling I have determined that I am basically right, just with a few refining steps added in.

The Tenth: how is gin made?

I believe that gin is some form of alcohol?

I have confirmed that yes. It is. It is in fact a liquor based on the flavor of juniper berries. Which is a bit strange, I think.

It is made by first distilling some spirits from whatever the heck you want, and then re-distilling those spirits but this time with some juniper berries and other plants and whatnot for more flavor, or something.

The End: how is it that i keep reading these?

Good question.

Why is…

I have returned, this time with some philosophically inquisitive questions.

And also less philosophical ones.

The First: why is the sky blue?

Very important question, and the first question I have answered that is actually kind of in my realm of expertise. The sky is blue because it is very sad and cries all the time, hence what we call rain.

Seriously.

Bad jokes aside, the sky is blue mostly because of how light works. This is also why the sky is not always blue (think sunsets). The sky is blue because the light that is coming to the earth from the sun passes through the atmosphere to get to us. (Good thing it does, too, because without the atmosphere we would be dead on the outside as well as on the inside). To put it simply, the sky is blue because that’s the frequency that is most scattered by little tiny atmosphere-particles. The sky gets to be different colors during sunrise and sunset because there is more atmosphere to travel through, leaving us with longer-frequency light (like orange and red).

The Second: why is the ocean salty?

Because there is a hecka lot of salt in it.

That’s the main reason.

If you want to know why the salt is in there, it’s because of the water cycle. The water rains down on the land, ends up in rivers and travels to the ocean. On the way to the ocean, the water passes over a lot of rocks and often takes little bits of the rocks with it. By the time the water gets to the ocean, it has a bunch of little rocks and minerals in it (like salt). The water then evaporates up out of the ocean (so it can rain back down again), leaving all of its minerals (salt included) behind. This process happening over and over again for a very long time has resulted in an ocean with a lot of salt in it.

The Third: why is my poop green?

I don’t know, but if you look it up on webMD with a bunch of other made-up symptoms, it appears you have viral gastroenteritis.

It is often a sign of bile pigment. Basically if the poop goes through you too fast (think diarrhea) then it doesn’t get broken down all the way to brown, and is left green. Basically green poop is adolescent poop.

The Fourth: why is portland called rip city?

This one is probably only on here because Google has been stalking me.

Basically, some announcer dude named Bill said it in a Trailblazers game and people liked how it sounded. Literally. That’s it. Bill Schonely, the announcer of the Blazers, just said it during a game against the Lakers in 1971 in response to some long-distance shot that one of the Blazers players made.

The Fifth: why is kahneeta closing?

I have no clue who or what kahneeta is.

Apparently, Kah-Nee-Ta is a resort in Oregon (once again, Google is spying). It’s based in the Warm Springs Indian Reservation (hence the name, I guess).

It appears to be closing for the most boring and predictable reason possible: it’s not making enough money to stay open.

It’s too bad, it looks like a nice place.

The Sixth: why is gamora?

Spoiler Alert.

I would say that it’s because Thanos wanted to make himself feel better about being horrible. So he saved her life, and thus Gamora is.

Oddly enough I would say that’s also the answer to “why isn’t gamora.”

The Seventh: why is tag rated r?

Clearly for language throughout, crude sexual content, drug use and brief nudity.

Obviously.

The Eighth: why is my computer so slow?

Because it never exercises.

Have you tried turning it off and walking away and doing something else with your life?

The Ninth: why is my internet so slow?

It’s tough to say why your internet is slow, but it could be from either an abundance of worms, or a bunch of other techy reasons, none of which are as entertaining as an abundance of worms.

The Tenth: why is multnomah falls closed?

Most likely from the Eagle Creek fire. It’s hard for forests to recover from fires with people walking all over them. I mean just think about it, wouldn’t it be hard for you to recover from being set on fire with people walking all over you? It just makes sense.

The End: why did I look at this with my own two eyes (or one, I don’t judge)?

I tried to make this one shorter, because some people complained that the last one was much too long. I hope you learned something very useful and life changing; but I’m a realist. I should probably just say hopefully you’re actually reading this sentence and you made it to the end of the post.

What is a…

So. I am starting a series on my blog. You’ll catch on pretty quickly as to how it works so I won’t bother explaining it. Anyway, I’m bad at introductions so let’s just jump right in.

The First: what is a thesis statement?

The internet’s burning question is academic, either that or Google’s secret service knows me pretty well. Whether it is actually the top “a” question or not doesn’t matter to me as this series is all about artificial, computer-generated lists so I might as well just stick to my plan and answer the question.

According to my literal actual super-heavy dictionary, a thesis is “a proposition that is maintained by argument.” At least that’s the definition that I understand; there’s a bunch more about “metrical feet” and whatnot. Let’s stick to the first one. A thesis statement would then have to be a statement that has a thesis in it. Tada! We’re done.

Wait, should I explain the dictionary definition at all? I shouldn’t? Oh well, too late. To put it simply, the thesis is the main question of a paper. It’s the whole reason you’re writing a paper (other than the reason that it was almost certainly assigned to you by a teacher). When you write a thesis, you want it to be as concise as the definition of “thesis” was, if possible. That definition has seven words. Seven. That’s super concise. All of your theses statements should be concise. They should also be complete, though. Your thesis statement needs to fully lay out the question that you are answering. Also, it’s incredibly important for you to use the word “teeth” in your thesis statement. Don’t ask why. You’ll learn when you become a true writer. All true writers use the word “teeth” a lot.

The Second: what is an adjective?

Okay so to be completely honest I don’t know the answer to this one. I never liked grammar in school so I didn’t learn any of it. I managed to answer the “thesis statement” without doing any googling, but I don’t think I can do that with this one. *sigh* I feel like an idiot.

We pause for some brief Google-ing.

Right! I remember. An adjective describes stuff. It’s a word you use to make other words fit reality better. Like if I’m talking about a mouse, versus talking about a massive, pink mouse. Both ways could be describing the same thing, but one of them generates a very different and much more specific mental picture. In related news: I have a newfound fear of massive, pink mice after that mental picture game.

The Third: what is antifa?

If you are a reasonably intelligent reader, this is probably the first one that might actually be something you don’t already know about. (If you also didn’t know what an adjective was, then I appreciate you and I think you’re lying). This one is also going to take some research on my part.

Short answer: Antifa is short for “anti-fascist.”

Less short answer: Antifa is short for “anti-fascist and also really aggressive about it”

Longer answer: Antifa is a term used to describe a bunch of far-left extremists and extremist groups who use violence and other means of intimidation to harass people who they view as fascist or racist.

The Fourth: what is a bull market?

I have absolutely no clue.

My first thought was a bunch of cows selling drugs out behind the barn.

It turns out I was not correct.

A bull market is actually a financial term referring to a market that people like. That is to say, it is a market in which prices are expected to go up, usually describing the stock market.

I’m not sure what that has to do with bulls, however…

Okay I have answered that question as well. It seems the two kinds of markets are a bull and a bear, named this because of how they attack things? The bull attacks things by thrusting up with its horns, and the bear attacks things by swiping down with its paws. This apparently was a sound enough analogy for economists to name their whole system either a bull (going up) or a bear (going down). I also understand the game of Pit much better now.

The Fifth: what is a verb?

Once again. No clue. I really should have learned these things.

Got it. It’s an action. Or a state. Or an occurrence. I don’t really understand those second two, but that hasn’t stopped me from explaining anything thus far. An “action” is doing a thing, like “The pig flies, despite what people say about him.” In this sentence, the verb is “flies” because that is what the pig is doing. I have Googled the second and third ones as well. A “state” would be like “The pig is clearly living his best life now.” In this case, the state verb is “is” because that’s the way the pig exists at the moment. Lastly, an occurrence: “The pig became a better pig as a result of flying above people’s expectations.” In this sentence, “became” is an occurrence, because it marks how the pig is now a better pig. Good little piggy. Now go to the bull market.

The Sixth: what is a good credit score?

So far the main takeaway from this project for me has been that I don’t really know anything at all. I mean, I think you want high numbers? Higher numbers are good?

Yes. I was right this time. Big numbers are good. But not too big. If your credit score is 11,904 then you’re looking at the wrong number. Credit scores are on a scale from 300-850, and a good one would be from around 670 on up for FICO and 700 on up for VantageScore.

Okay, that question answered. My question, though is, why on earth does the scale go from 300-850? What makes those number special?

After some serious Google research, I still cannot find out why it is beyond that it is somehow related to how they calculate the scores. If anyone reads this and knows why it ranges through those specific values, please tell me; I’m very curious now.

The Seventh: what is asmr?

Clearly an acronym.

ASMR stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. It’s apparently some weird tingling on the skin that goes from your scalp down your neck to your upper back? This sounds super sketch. Wikipedia says that there were other names proposed that were not chosen, one of which is “brain orgasm,” which leads me to believe that this weird tingling is apparently something good and/or enjoyable.

It is apparently often triggered by whispering or other soft, relaxing sounds. So that sounds nice. Maybe I should try this thing. I just have to find someone to whisper soothing things in my ear. Unfortunately, I don’t trust anyone not to yell in my ear.

The Eighth: what is a meme?

Oh boy.

If you’re talking like a smart person, a meme is a piece of culture that is passed from one person to another, generally through nongenetic means.

If you’re talking like a slightly more normal human being, a meme is an idea with a loosely set meaning that is passed around the internet (Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.), constantly being changed or used to communicate varying ideas within the same somewhat relatable structure.

If you’re talking like an internet person, a meme is probably your life’s work.

The Ninth: what is a tariff?

It’s a tax, either on stuff we’re getting or on stuff we’re sending. It’s a way for the government to make certain things harder to buy (like maybe aluminum and steel imports) because those things get more expensive.

It’s also a weapon that a president can use to engage in a trade war with other countries when they want to. This is not always a good idea.

The Tenth: what is a hernia?

I assume it is painful, but I do not know what it is.

Ah. I have learned what it is and the pictures are gross.

Basically, a hernia seems to be when part of your insides tries to go to the wrong part of your body. Which sounds horrible.

It doesn’t seem to be a huge problem, though, it usually just causes a lot of pain. No worries there.

Doctors can treat it by, I assume, putting the insides back where they go? I guess? Sure. I’m sticking with that theory.

The End: what did I just read?

Thanks for making it to the end of this presumably boring blog post. I just wanted to learn more about stuff and so I figured that this would be a great way to do that. Hopefully, you learned about stuff as well. If you have any questions that you would like answered, don’t hesitate to send me a message on the message thing.

Beginnings

I never was very good at writing. My favorite subjects in school were always math and science and even reading, but never writing. Writing always feels so subjective; like anything could happen. At least with math, science, and reading there is a well-defined set of inputs an outputs. Not so with writing. Writing is putting a piece of your inner world that you barely understand in feelings, let alone words, out in the open where anyone can see it. Writing is specific and vague and flexible and structured and it makes no sense.

The hardest part of writing, for me at least, is always the beginning. It’s staring at a blank page and wondering what will fill

all

that

empty

space.

The only way I’ve found to get past that feeling is to just start: type some words to fill the void and then even if they’re wrong, I have something to work with; something to fix; some problems to solve.

This blog post isn’t saying anything.

It isn’t outlining my plan for this blog.

It isn’t even presenting a vague idea of what I might talk about.

It’s just words on a page.

It’s just the first sentence.

It’s just a beginning for its own sake.

It’s just hoping that now that the page isn’t blank, now that there is something filling the empty space, I will finally find something to say.