ztraffer

Us humans have an urge to make things our own; objects, ideas, other people. Knowing, seeing, touching, are not enough: we have to posses. The more we are attracted to something, the more we are driven this way. And if we can't have it, we become restless, distraught; we suffer, even. Why this urge? As a way to incorporate them into our own identity, or as a way to counter the fear of loss, perhaps. As someone once said, the things we own end up owning us -or in the words of Master Yoda: "train yourself, you must, to let go of that which you are afraid of loosing." Giving up on something we want can be harder than straining every muscle in our bodies, and yet it requires no physical energy; why is that drive so strong? If we do let go, however, the benefits become clear -a sense of liberation, of freedom, of lightness. Why then, is it so hard sometimes, to just let go?

Way back when, at the turn of the millenium, I was part of a big family called Genuity. As in all families, there were disagreements, triumphs, bitter fights, great friendships, and the bond of common goals and struggles. It was in a way, a coming of age, a rite of passage at a critical time. Though for me it only lasted three years, it seemed like much longer -they were after all, not regular years, but internet years, and events that would normally develop over months, took only weeks. We were all still riding the internet boom, and things happened fast. Not surprisingly, they also ended fast. The much anticipated crash was finally beginning to happen. Then came the coup de grace on 9/11. Three rounds of lay-offs later, there was no longer a "u" in Genuity, as the joke went -and a pink slip was my inspiration to migrate westward. A few months after that, Genuity was little more than a billion-dollar garage sale. It is amazing how quickly time erodes the past. Today, while ...

OK, maybe not free, but definitley affordable. [ x ][ > ]

...I didn't start the fight, but I'm definitely finishing it

Moving to a new place made me realize how incredibly dependant our lives are on all kinds of non-essentials. One kind of soap for the dishwasher, another for hand-washing, another for laundry, another for manual dish-washing, another for hair-washing (called shampoo), another for car-washing; printer-paper, toilet paper, resume-letter paper, paper-towels, lens-cleaning paper, bureaucracy-related paper; usb cables, dvi cables, rgb cables, coaxial cables, ethernet cables, power cables, speaker cables, s-video cables, hdmi cables, rca cables... at times I felt like I was wading through a garbage dump, only I depended on the garbage for my daily existence. Such is the way of the industrial age -without the mass consumption of all these "goods" our civilization as we know it could not sustain itself -and so, I fill box after box with add-ons to accessories to things needed to make other things work, which together with yet other things, while connected to even more things, enable...

I just coined this term to describe the condition where you suffer a temporary disorientation caused by typing on the wrong keyboard and not seeing anything happen on the screen -seen most often in those having at least two keyboards and screens on their desks.

Some pictures from last weekend's hike to Mt Rainier. Though the mountain is majestic and the views breathtaking, the trail istsefl -if one can call it that- is less than satisfactory. Most of it consists of climbing over crumbling stones, gravel, sand and the occasional snowfield. With virtually no vegeatation to protect the rock, extreme temperatures, ice, and water, make the effects of erosion plain to the observer. The spectacular views, however, make it all worthwhile.