Sometimes I Wonder...

Sometimes I wonder about a lot of different things. It’s not that I give these things a great deal of thought – well, not most of the time at least. But from time to time something pops into my head, the wheels get turning, I look off into the distance, and a few benign puffs of noncarcinogenic smoke waft out of my ears. And the wondering begins.

I don’t actually come to any concrete determinations or solve any pressing world problems – well, not most of the time at least. Still I do spend a lot of time wondering. Here are a few examples (some of these will have to become the subjects of future blog posts).

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Sometimes I wonder why the girl who was supposed to be “the one” wasn’t.

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Sometimes I wonder whether the atoms in my body might be like millions of tiny solar systems. Maybe I am their universe, and my cells are galaxies filled with these atomic solar systems. And maybe some of those systems have teeny tiny people looking out and wondering the same thing. Maybe our solar system is nothing more than an atomic particle in some much larger organism. Maybe the Milky Way is just one cell in an enormous person, or a giant fish, or a really big worm.

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Sometimes I wonder why the Russian government insists on being such dicks.

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Sometimes I wonder what happened to the Colorado I fell in love with years ago.

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Sometimes I wonder what she’s doing tonight. (from an old song)

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Sometimes I wonder just how much we can really trust science. As a kid, I was enthralled with science, and for most of my life I have marveled at the new achievements, technology, and life improvements that science has brought us. But I have also come to see how closely intermingled science is with politics, and it makes me skeptical.

Climate science, for example, with all its warnings about impending doom from human-induced climate change, would be a lot easier to accept if the political influence – even manipulation – of the scientific establishment wasn’t so obvious. Scientists are products of academic environments where only one political view – the socialist/liberal view – is allowed. So the majority of scientists will sway with the winds of that political view without even thinking about it. It’s the same for journalists and many other influencers in society.

For all its modern wonders, science has its limits; it always has. And within these limits, politicians cynically use science to support their agendas. Centuries ago, science supported the dominant political view (mainly from the Church) that the world was flat and the sun revolved around the Earth. As recently as the 19^th century, science supported the dominant political view (mainly from economic concerns) that the white race was superior and African people were less evolved. This made the enslavement of Africans acceptable.

So I wonder about climate science and its shameless use by certain political factions (Al Gore, for example). But that’s not all. I am becoming more and more skeptical of genetic science, especially when it is used to determine human origins.

I find myself unable to blindly accept the “out of Africa” theory of human origins and believe that the “multiregional theory” has been given seriously short shrift. There are just too many holes in the theory that all people alive today come from a small group that migrated out of Africa relatively recently.

This theory fits nicely with the liberal political view that we are all the same and that we should all be singing “kumbaya” together. And I suspect that this is why it has been pushed so strongly by the scientific community. But there seems to be a lot they can’t explain.

And just as we know that a number of climate scientists have falsified their data to fit the political result they wanted to achieve, I have a suspicion that genetic researchers could well be doing the same. Sometimes I wonder about that.

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Sometimes I wonder why it so often happens that seriously mentally ill people ascend to the ultimate leadership positions of nations and empires. Why do we have a Putin in Russia or a Kim Fat Boy in North Korea? Why did history give us Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Castro, Che Guevara and so many others? What is it in the social psychology of certain societies that permits, or even facilitates, the rise of murderous dictators?

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Sometimes I wonder what the people around me really see when they look at me.

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Sometimes I wonder why I have so many little gnats flying around in my kitchen and where they so suddenly come from.

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Sometimes I wonder why I was so incredibly naïve and stupid, and made so many bad decisions, in my early 20s. And why did that set the stage for some other doosies later?

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Sometimes I wonder if coming to Ukraine 10 years ago was a continuation of that “bad decision” thing from my earlier days.

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Sometimes I wonder why I always end up spending long holiday weekends alone.

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Sometimes I wonder why otherwise reasonable people become so unreasonable – even hateful – where politics are concerned. Why are people so unwilling to listen to each other, consider other points of view, or even accept a plain truth?

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Sometimes I wonder, I really wonder, why people smoke cigarettes. To me, cigarette stench is one of the top three to five worst odors imaginable. I don’t understand why some people actually choose to ingest something that they know is slowly killing them and that coats them and their clothes in such a putrid odor.

And in their weak dependency on their nicotine fixes, smokers are ridiculously inconsiderate to the people around them who only want to be able to breathe clean air. It’s awful to walk past a smoker on the sidewalk or get into an elevator that had been used by smokers just before. I really don’t get it.

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Sometimes I wonder why the heart decides to latch on to someone or something that it absolutely should not, that is wrong for any number of reasons, and then won’t let go until it is exhausted and broken.

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Sometimes I wonder why we have such romantic notions about the Lakota nation of Native Americans having “their land” taken from them by white Americans when only a few generations earlier, the Lakota had moved west into the northern Great Plains and taken the land from the Cheyenne (who had earlier taken it from another tribe), from the Pawnee and from other tribes in the region. It was never “their land” in the first place.

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Sometimes I wonder if I should have gotten a kitten (or two) five or six years ago.

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Sometimes I wonder about the Internet. Why has something with so much potential for good has become little more than a tool for marketing, propaganda, fake news, political and religious hate, porn, and just wasting time?

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Sometimes I wonder how many people have crossed my path who were supposed to be important in my life or who had a message for me, but I never noticed them.

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Sometimes I wonder why I stopped camping and spending days at a time out in wild nature. Maybe living in my mountain home made camping irrelevant, and I got out of the habit. But it was a darn good habit.

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Sometimes I wonder why what seemed like a great idea a year and a half ago turned out to be anything but.

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Sometimes I wonder about the dreams I have at night. I have such rich dreams with such wild combinations of places, people and situations. I wonder what messages might be in the dreams for me. But I can never figure it out, so I just try to enjoy the nightly “movies.”

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Sometimes I wonder why, after so many years, I never remarried.

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And that’s enough for this edition.

The Zombies Are Here, Now!

A few days ago I was sitting in a café having breakfast as I usually do on Wednesday mornings before my classes. The place is pretty large and located in a popular business/shopping center in the center of Kharkiv. And it has free Wi-Fi.

There are few people when I first come in, and it’s usually pretty quiet. Somewhere between 8:30 and 9:00 it starts to fill up with teenagers. Apparently there is a high school nearby. They begin to swarm in groups around tables (we used to call such groups “cliques”). Some mornings, like this one, there are quite a lot of them.

Generally, they don’t buy anything. They just take up space and free Wi-Fi bandwidth. That’s nothing new. But the thing that really gets my attention is what they do in their gaggles around the tables: practically nothing except to stare at the little electronic screens in their hands.

Socializing in Isolation

They gather in groups, which one would think is about socializing in person with friends, creating and cementing bonds, stuff like that. But even as they sit there shoulder-to-shoulder with their friends, they almost completely ignore each other. Their faces are transfixed on their mobile devices. If they say anything at all, it’s about something they see on their devices, probably suggesting that their friends check it out as well.

It strikes me as incredibly odd how these teenagers feel a need on one hand to gather and associate with one another, yet on the other hand are so consumed by their mobile phones that they do so in virtual isolation.

As I was looking at a group closest to me, I saw one guy who was not staring at a phone. He was looking around and trying to talk to others in his group, they occasionally answered him, barely looking up from their tiny screens. He seemed OK with it. Interestingly, he was the only one I saw who actually bought something from the café.

It was sad to look around that place and see so many faces bent downwards into mobile phones: almost all of them. What are these kids going to become when they grow up?

But it’s not limited to teenagers. Look around in almost any public place these days and you see people zombified by smart phones and tablets. And this is Ukraine, which has historically run a little behind the West in these sorts of things. I can only imagine how complete the zombification must be in Denver, Boston, Paris or Tokyo.

Massive Psychological Shift?

Maybe it’s even beyond sad. Sometimes it seems to me like there is some evil force at work here, something that is creating a psychological shift in the masses, systematically changing how our brains work, creating a generation of mindless drones who simply take in the numbing pabulum of the Internet.

These days, a person can’t take a short bus ride, go up briefly in an elevator, or stand in a line for a few minutes without his or her face in a mobile device. And in most cases, they aren’t getting anything new or special from what they see; often they are looking at the same stuff on Facebook or their Instagram feeds for the third or fourth time. It just gives them something to do to avoid being in the real world.

Something is definitely wrong here, something that speaks to a growing psychological problem.

The psychological effect comes to light in the way people treat their devices compared to how they treat other people. More and more, the devices seem to matter more, to be more important. What we would normally consider common courtesy seems to be disappearing.

It's Personally Insulting

A few months back, I had lunch with someone I know. She immediately put her smartphone on the table and was constantly looking down at it as alerts came across the screen. It was like our conversation – any my company – was secondary to whatever popped up on her screen.

I didn’t say anything at the time, but in retrospect it was really disrespectful and offensive. And I know that I won’t tolerate it again in the future. If you want to be in my company, then be in my company; if you want to focus on your phone, then goodbye!

I’ve made it a point recently to “lay down the law” regarding mobile devices in my classroom. At the beginning of each course, I let people know that they’re free to use their devices for translation if necessary, but that I will not tolerate people sitting in class checking out their messages or, even worse, writing messages. The class is only 55 minutes – they can live that long without their devices.

Every day I see people in my office, on the street, and elsewhere who can’t seem to do anything or go anywhere without their faces in their devices. As they walk, they are often hazards to others and themselves, but they are so hypnotized, so dependent on some kind of satisfaction they get from these things, that they can’t stop themselves. It’s scary.

Now, I have an iPhone, and I even have an Apple Watch, so I am pretty connected. But I own the devices – they don’t own me. In class, my phone goes into my bag. If I meet a friend, the phone stays in a pocket or bag, NOT on the table. I refuse to insult someone that way.

Almost exactly four years ago, April 7, 2013, I wrote a post on this subject called Losing Our Humanity. It all seemed pretty sad to me even then. But now, it just seems to be getting exponentially worse. I don’t know what the answer is, but I think this video says it all…

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The Man Who Never Saw Game of Thrones

I have always been slow to get in on the latest trends, especially with regard to television. To be honest, I consider that a good thing.

Almost all majorly hyped television “events” and “experiences” have garnered barely a “meh” from me as millions of people fell all over themselves to hop on the trend-train. Most people seem to want to be part of the TV-dictated in-crowd; for them, the worst fate would be to miss an episode and not be able to talk knowingly about it at work the next morning.

But not me. I’ve never really cared about that, and I don’t think I’ve missed much. After all, who wants to waste life sitting on a sofa watching television? It’s much better to sit at a desk for hours looking at a computer, right?

Actually, watching television is probably better for you than staring at a computer screen. Television allows you to sit further back from the screen and enjoy the comfort of a nice sofa, recliner or easy chair. And on that sofa or in that chair, you can change positions: you can sit up straight, lie on your left side, switch to your right, put a pillow behind your back – the possibilities are endless.

Computers, on the other hand, demand that you sit in a bad chair at a desk with your spine curved forward and your head bent over. Often you rest your upper body on your elbows, and your vertebrae are almost continuously pinched down at the front and lifted apart in the rear. I’m sure any orthopedic specialist would recommend television watching over hours in front of a computer screen.

And as I think about it, I really don’t remember having any back problems in my sofa and TV days. And I was actually more active then, running, softball, evenings at the gym, etc. But watching movies and documentaries on my computer just might be the biggest culprit in my chronic back pain – that and working most of the day at a computer.

I remember my favorite chair-TV combination: it was a wonderfully comfortable reclining easy chair I had when I lived in Japan. During sumo tournaments, I would come home, settle into the chair, and then watch the day’s matches. Sometimes I would fall asleep for a bit, but I would always jerk awake toward the end when the best guys – the yokozuna and ozeki – were fighting.

I had another really comfortable TV chair in my Parker, Colorado, home a long time ago. My cats really liked it too, especially when I was in it. When I moved to the mountains, it became my meditation chair.

But I digress…

Television "Experiences"

There have been several big television “experiences” that I have missed in real time over the years. For example, I was slow to warm up to some of the popular situation comedies of the 1990s. I did become a regular watcher of Seinfeld and Friends in the early days of those shows, but that was mainly because a bunch of us regularly met in the bar at our apartment complex after working out in the gym in the same building. So it was more of a social compact. And exercise was a part of it, so it was a good thing.

Perhaps the biggest TV thing that I totally missed out on was The Sopranos. When I first heard about it – after I realized it was not about opera singers – I dismissed it as some tacky rip-off of The Godfather and countless other Mafia movies. Besides, it was on HBO, which required a subscription to watch. I wasn’t going to pay extra just for that, so I paid it no further mind.

By the time The Sopranos finished its run on HBO and a “cleaned-up” version began airing on A&E (without all the bad language and occasional nudity), I caught some episodes and was hooked. Back here in Ukraine, I found a site where I could watch every episode from each season in the original HBO “adult-content.”

And I could binge-watch, which was great because I didn’t have to wait a week to find out who was going to get whacked. Immediate gratification – it’s a wonderful thing.

But the best thing was that I got into it because I wanted to, not because it was trendy.

A few years after The Sopranos finished its run, HBO began airing another “experience”: Game of Thrones. By this time, I was already more than three years into my exile in Ukraine and barely watching television at all – with the exception of consuming all the old episodes of The Sopranos and finding episodes online (for free) of a new gangster series from HBO called Boardwalk Empire.

So I caught Boardwalk Empire from the beginning – a nicely written and well-acted show, but not an “experience” like The Sopranos or Game of Thrones. That’s just how I seem to do things.

Game of Thrones?

When I first heard of this show called Game of Thrones, I thought it was some kind of stupid reality show. So, just as with The Sopranos years earlier, I paid it no further mind.

Now I’m kind of sorry about that.

As I understand it, Game of Thrones has all kinds of things that I would love in a TV “experience.” The setting is sort of medieval northern European, and I’ve always liked those kinds of movies. I am told that it includes all sorts of intrigue and plot twists, not to mention lots of swordplay, epic battles and similar stuff. So I was thinking Lord of the Rings or Braveheart – more of my favorites.

And from a few trailers and clips I’ve seen on You-Tube, there are a lot of beautiful women, many of whom often dispense with their clothing. Woah! Count me in!

But, alas… six seasons have gone by, and I’ve never seen even one episode. So I have no sense of the story, which makes it too late to start watching now. And finding a way to watch it for free online in the original English – as I did with The Sopranos – seems increasingly difficult these days.

I sort of feel like I’ve really missed something this time. But, then again, can you really say that you’ve “missed something” when that something is just a television program? Probably not.  But still, I’d like to see it someday.

So what’s a boy to do? I can’t just pick up with the current season and start watching it (supposing I could even find it for free online). I would have no context in which to understand what was happening.

I suppose I will just have to wait until some day when I have enough time to find Game of Thrones on DVD and watch it from the beginning. I will binge watch it, just as I did with The Sopranos. What a fine waste of time that would be.

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