Beauty

Geek

I am a geek. I know this because I just spent a Friday night installing a new hard drive in my computer and watching computer simulated dogfights in the History channel -and it was fun.

Espresso

For the last week or so, I have been getting only 4-6 hours of sleep a night. This is not good, even with the added energy of regular workouts, after a few days this routine has the -some say negative- effect of reducing my normal brain power by ninety percent.
Luckily, there is an all-curing balsam called Coffee.
I'm not talking about the filtered boiled-socks juice that passes for coffee for some people, I'm talking about coffee beans grown in the mountain slopes of Sumatra or Colombia or some place where coffee is supposed to be grown, then cured and roasted to perfection, shipped to your favorite coffee stand to be ground seconds before hot steam condenses as it passes through it, capturing all its flavor and other qualities in the perfect shot of espresso. Three of these, combined with chocolate syrup, steamed milk, water, and whipped cream make up my usual grande mocha with an extra shot. By means of a caffeine and sugar high, it has the effect of restoring -if not the actual, at least the illusion of- a normal mental state. But it does more than that. It is definitely a mood enhancer –imagine being transported from a modern, neon-lit, slightly cold and grey Monday morning in a plastic and metal office chair, to an old, warm leather armchair by the fireplace, in a log cabin somewhere, surrounded by an old-growth forest. Well, not exactly, but that’s the best way I can think to describe it. All this from a hot beverage. How I went from not liking coffee, to my current state, is somewhat of a long story, but let’s say that along the way I was in need of a sleep substitute.

Take enough caffeine, and your state in the morning after a sleepless night goes from zombie to alert. The price you pay is your judgment. If your brain is truly exhausted, it will still make mistakes; paradoxically, sleeping eventually becomes more productive than staying awake. And by the way... lack of sleep kills neurons.

Starlight

Gazing at the sky on a clear night, induces in me a special state of mind -a kind of exhilaration that is hard to describe; a sort of star drunkenness. If I see nothing but sky in my field of view, I feel a kind of vertigo, as if freed from the gravity well. Touched by the light of countless suns -threads of light connecting me to places and times almost too far to imagine: what was/is it like at the other end of those threads of light? I try to imagine one of them. A star system, desolate and majestic -or perhaps, inhabited by a civilization... Are they still around? What tides of history swept them, and what have they learned? Could we communicate -what have they achieved, how do they see the universe, what could we learn from them? What could they learn from us? Is there a twin soul among them looking at the sky, who thinks like I do? When I think about this, looking up into the night, I wonder how many others here have these thoughts. None too many, I suspect.

Perhaps I need not look farther than the mirror, to find an alien mind.

Cynism?

Watching a would-be presidential nominee answer questions on television, I realized that it was virtually impossible for me to take anything he said at face value. Without even realizing it, a part of my mind was thinking about how much of what he said was his position, and how much was calculated or tinted to be picked up favorably by spin doctors, please the public, and offend no one. How he directed every answer into something that may benefit his campaign -begun even before an exploratory commitee was appointed, but not as early at the -probably intentionaly leaked- rumours of his entering the race. And this was one of my favorite candidates. I realized that I do this quite often, even with people I know -after all, even the most honest and trustworthy people have subjective perspectives that bias their perception, and so I compensate accordingly, to get a more accurate picture. Sometimes I feel like I am doing a simultaneous translation for myself; when I find myself doing it, and reflecting upon this action on yet another level, I start to wonder: am I being cynical, wise -or just jaded?
I think, all of the above.