Access Denied

The company that provides me with internet, which shall not be named here, is having technical problems.  This means I may not be posting again until I have proper internet access again.

I will, however, be posting the first installment of my trip to America when the internet is playing nice with others again.

Stream of consciousness

So yesterday I posted about science and managed to forget to mention the fantastic view in the sky on Monday night that helped inspire the post.  I didn't manage to snap a decent photo of it myself, but it was something like this:

Source

The moon is reasonably easy to pick in the picture, but the small bright dot in the bottom right is less so.  That is Jupiter.  On Monday, blessed with clear skies, this was roughly the view I had before Jupiter moved behind the moon.

This I enjoyed for two reasons, the first is that it allowed me to pull out a word that I don't get to use anywhere near enough - syzygy, meaning an alignment of three celestial objects (and also the only word in English that includes three 'y's).  The second is simply the sheer beauty and awesome magnitude that is demonstrated.

That got me thinking about whether the terms 'beauty' and 'magnitude' have any inherent meaning about the moon and Jupiter, or even to syzygy, and realised that it was (as the cliche goes) all in the eye of the beholder.

The thing I read the following day, about 3.8 million years of success leading to me also got me thinking, and thus came the blog post.  I've said before that I'm writing these stream of consciousness style and although I am going back to fix spelling and grammar and to change wording slightly for clarity, I have been trying not to start these posts with an idea of what is going to be there at the end.

This meant that when I got to the end of yesterday's post I was faced with a conundrum, I had wanted to mention the syzygy (in no small part because of the word itself) of the Earth, moon and Jupiter, but I'd managed to get to the end of the post without doing it.  Even though I liked the post and felt that it tied up effectively at the end I was sorely tempted to change it to include some reference to this.

I eventually decided not to because the whole point of stream of consciousness is that this might happen and something better may come from it, and that I should deal with it.  Also because it gave me a prompt for another post today.

Science, the good and the bad

Science can sometimes make you feel really good about yourself and, you know, everything - ever.  Then at other times it really wants to kick you when you're down.

Today I read something online that said "You are the result of 3.8 million years of evolutionary success.  Act like it."  Which is fairly inspiring when you feel a bit down - 2.8 million years of success resulted in me!

A while ago I had a less uplifting experience when it was pointed out to me that every moment I ever spent thinking about how impossibly unique I am and how amazing it is I am able to have those thoughts at all is a moment I'll never have again and everything I could possibly achieve becomes less likely to occur with each passing moment.

Then there are times when science is just hilarious, like when scientists decided to study the centre of the galaxy and discovered it tastes like raspberries.

I was thinking about these and realised that while what science studies will exist whether we study it or not, it is the people involved in science that truly give it its awesome, terrifying and hilarious aspects.  The wonder is in the observation and understanding not the observed.  And the power to influence how a particular fact or discovery is received rests with people too.

It is something that I'm noticing more and more, everyone has a spin they want to put on things and that can be good or bad.  A lot of the time people don't even realise the effect it might have.

Hopefully this response to a petition for building a death star will have a positive impact on you, just think of the trouble Paul Shawcross went to to make this funny and engaging to the people who signed the petition and to make sure it had as many references to the films as possible.  You know that people are going to get a kick out of reading this and the authors will never get to see it, but they crafted it with obvious enjoyment and reverence anyway.

I wish more people could be like that more of the time.  Myself included.

Finding the words

I had something very weird happen to me the other day, it even frightened me a little.  I have spent rather a large amount of time since returning from the United States reading and writing about culture, business and expanding knowledge base so these subjects have been looming pretty large in my mind.

Also, because business studies is something I have previously worked on for all of never, I have been stressing about it - to the extent that it has been popping up in my dreams.  Trust me, marketing managers preventing your superhero alterego from catching the villain with their dancing spreadsheets isn't something you want to happen, even in your sleep.

Dreams are dreams, though, and that wasn't the weird thing that happened to me.  No, the weird thing was when I realised I had forgotten how to talk to people. Weird right?

I was out with friends, doing everything I could to relax and put the whole assignments issue out of my mind for a few hours - which, of course, meant that I was thinking about it most of the night.  This in turn meant that I was only following the conversations in the absolute broadest sense of the term and not participating much.  For anyone out there who knows me, they will probably realise that this is fairly unusual behaviour for me and a couple of people decided to check if I was alright.

I'd like to stop for a moment to say good on them, they are awesome friends and I wish more people in the world could be awesome friends.

Anyways, they asked if things were ok and I sat there for about five seconds doing that disturbing fish thing of opening and closing my mouth while I tried to remember how to form a coherent sentence that didn't involve supply chains or market trends.  I eventually came up with "Yeah, just thinking about my assignments." and then managed to actually get into the swing of things.

This was the first time in my life that I have found myself completely unable to say anything, just forming the words was a gargantuan task for some reason.  And this freaked me out because words are so very important to me.

"Sigh"

I have a friend who always insists on writing omgosh in online chat to show that she isn't blaspheming.  This got me thinking about the number of people who say this but are atheists, shouldn't they say omct rather than omg as they believe in the chaos theory rather than any sort of god.  As an agnostic I feel I should probably write omubogapdpttsiitfohawmomnae (oh my unspecified being of great and possibly divine power that takes some interest in the fate of humanity and who may or may not actually exist) although possibly worded differently for the sake of not taking up almost an entire twitter post just to write the acronym.

I mention this first because it amuses me a little.  There is a particular language usage doesn't amuse me in the slightest, though, and that is people who say sigh.

Now I'm not talking about the word in general, it is a great word that is useful to describe a forceful outlet of breath.  No, I'm talking about people who say sigh instead of actually sighing, or worse those who sigh and then feel the need to emphasise it by saying sigh afterwards.

My issue with this is that a sigh is supposed to signify that whatever is being sighed at is not great, but it isn't terrible either, it's just meh.  Spending additional energy forming the word rather than just breathing out heavily is far too much work for something that wasn't worth the effort in the first place.  And yes I realise that I am doing the same thing by writing an entire post about it...

Well at least she didn't say sigh at me.  Source

My theory is that ranting about it here will make it easier for me to put up with it when my friends say it, which is far too often.  Then again, I have been informed that it annoys others when I use weird worth order such as "my liking is of the not so much variety" or try and enlarge the English language with things like "nonsensicality" so I probably shouldn't complain about it.

Maybe I'll turn into Spiderman!

Well today I woke up covered in spider bites and discovered that sometime while I'd been in America and my mattress wasn't getting disturbed every night, some spiders had decided to take up residence therein.  So that was a fun start to the day.

And, of course, it just got better from there because then I had to deal with the issues related to this such as cleaning all my bedclothes and pesticiding my mattress (and yes, pesticiding is a real word... now!).

This has resulted in another day of procrastination from all the get-back-into-a-normal-routine-after-the-international-trip work I've been meaning to do since Monday.  Instead of doing anything useful like actually get started on the uni stuff I should be focusing on, I've been lying on the couch whining and generally wallowing in self-pity which my family has graciously put up with as they clearly weren't doing enough to stop spiders from setting up home in my mattress in the first place.

The only problem with this turn of events is that I feel guilty to myself.  Well, when I say the only problem, I mean apart from the itching across maybe 80% of my body, the fact that I currently look like some sort of retarded dalmatian with all the calamine lotion dabbed liberally on the various bite marks, and the fear that the same thing will happen again tonight.

The guilt to myself is because I know I should be starting all the get back into the swing of things stuff but three days later I still haven't done anything about it.  I feel like I've let myself down by taking the time to a) relax and b) get over the more pressing issues which have cropped up.  I am well aware that this is not sensible because I need the time to sort everything out, but that doesn't stop me from giving myself a hard time about it.

Home Sweet Home

So I'm home again, and it feels good to be back.  Not that I didn't enjoy myself in America but as Twoflower said in The Light Fantastic, "You haven't really been anywhere until you've got back home."

Well I'm back home now and will be sharing my first experience of international travel with you all soon, but I have to recover first and focus on getting back into gear for uni this semester.  I swear I will get stuff posted soon though.

For now, I shall provide you all with a set of reasons why I'm happy to be home:

My family, as much as I get annoyed with them occasionally they're still my family and I haven't been away from all of them for over a month before.  Whenever I was in a museum or gallery I kept wanting to turn to one of them to say something about the exhibit in front of me and they weren't there, but mostly I didn't realise how much I'd missed them until I got back.

Eucalypts, everything in the USA smelt slightly wrong and it took me a while to realise that it was lack of eucalyptus scent in the air.  Walking near my house yesterday everything just smelt like home.

Internet, as much as I did have internet access after my computer was fixed, the access could best be described as intermittent, unreliable and frustratingly slow.  I had so much trouble with it that I was barely checking my emails and communication from back home.  This may seem odd, but I was informed that in New Orleans all internet connections were stuffed up because of all the work to set up for the Superbowl and in LA several of the internet providers, including the one for my hotel were having fairly major issues with connection.

The internet thing has been kind of good too, though, because I've been able to relax for a couple of days just catching up on everything in my reader.  This has been a great way to avoid doing things like unpack or actually start my assignments while I recover from the jetlag I've had - which mainly consists of waking up at 3am and not being able to get back to sleep, no matter how tired I still am.

Anyway that's why I'm happy to be home, and posts about the trip are coming at some point but for now I'm eating vegemite and reading blogs and generally enjoying being home again.