I Still Wonder...

A week ago, I wrote a post entitled Sometimes I Wonder. It was about simple thoughts that come to my mind, either because the subjects are really ridiculous, because they are something that has affected me deeply, because they are just things I’ve noticed, or maybe for no real reason at all.

I had enough material for one long post or for several shorter ones. I opted to make the first post relatively short, so here’s more:

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Sometimes I wonder why so many people – Americans, mainly – choose to board airplanes dressed as though they just got out of bed, are going to the swimming pool, or plan to just lie on the sofa, drink beer and watch TV all day. Sure, it’s good to be comfortable, especially on long flights, but when did having a little pride in your public appearance go so out of style?

And why would people assume that the rest of us have no problem sitting next to some grossly overweight guy in gym shorts, flip-flops and a sweaty T-shirt? It’s bad enough to have to see such people in stores and such (this is why I never go to Wal-Mart), but in airports and on the plane? Come on! Usually I am proud to be an American, but there are moments – like so often on airplanes – when I am embarrassed as hell.

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Sometimes I wonder why I get so badly afflicted with writer’s block, especially on work projects. No matter what I try, sometimes I just can’t get the wheels to turn and good stuff to come out.

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Sometimes I wonder if grizzly bears think people are tasty or just easy to catch.

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Sometimes I wonder what’s wrong with some pet owners. Why do they embarrass themselves (and their pets) by dressing the animals up in stupid-looking clothes and pretending that they are little people? Pets are not children. What kind of insanity is it to put a cat or dog in some absolutely ridiculous little costume, take a moronic photo, and then show it off to the world on Instagram or Facebook? They think they’re making their little darlings look “soooo cute,” but in reality they’re just making themselves look soooo stupid.

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And on the subject of pets, sometimes I wonder what possesses some people to bring their dogs into a restaurant, cafe or food store. And even worse, why do those establishments allow it? The last thing I want to see in a restaurant is a flea wagon at the table next to me or in the produce or meat section of the market. 

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Sometimes I wonder why anyone would voluntarily put a totally acidic substance – Coca Cola – into their stomachs. What that stuff does to you is just plain scary!

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Sometimes I wonder whether I will ever again know what it’s like to be completely free of pain.

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Sometimes I wonder what Neanderthal people were really like. I think it would be interesting to go back in time and see them.

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Sometimes I wonder what became of my truck after I sold it. And I wonder the same sometimes about my mountain house.

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Sometimes I wonder what it’s like to be normal.

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Sometimes (like this past week) I wonder why the city of Kharkiv always shuts off the heat too early and leaves the residents to freeze for a month or so until spring really gets going.

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Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if we had met under different circumstances and without so many years between us.

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Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be invisible, just for a while. But it would have to be in the summer unless it was possible for your clothes to be invisible too.

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Sometimes I wonder whether the world is teetering on the edge of the next major conflagration, when it will happen, and where it will start. (And I hope it won't start in Ukraine.)

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Sometimes I wonder why we often fall in love with someone whom it’s impossible to be with.

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Sometimes I wonder what happened to my passion. Where has my deep desire for writing gone? How has my joy for teaching English become almost completely extinguished? When did I lose my love of sports and working out (a long time ago, obviously)? It seems like even my passion for living has flittered away, and I don’t know how to get it back.

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Sometimes I wonder why so many people think that driving fast and dangerously in a piece of machinery that weighs several tons and can kill people is just some kind of fun and games. We see it in the U.S., of course, but it’s particularly bad here in Kharkiv. Young guys, especially in expensive cars, seem to think that the city streets are their personal racetracks, red lights are just suggestions, and other cars and pedestrians are annoying obstacles to either race around or maybe even hit. Sometimes I wonder how those people are even allowed to be on the road.

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Sometimes I wonder how crocodiles survived the asteroid that hit the Earth 65 million years ago and killed off all the dinosaurs.

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Sometimes I wonder why I bother trying to teach and encourage people to write correctly when all the world seems dead set to just write any way they feel like it. Why bother teaching proper punctuation when no one seems to care? Why try to get students to stop capitalizing common nouns when the corporate world capitalizes them all over the place (especially in marketing)? Why try to teach proper spelling when even other teachers can’t seem to get the difference between their and there? Why try to teach the difference between countable and uncountable nouns when corporate morons put out crap with “trainings,” “educations” and “advices”? And why try to do any of this when you constantly have to battle the confusion caused by differing national writing styles and even different style interpretations within the national styles? 

And don't even get me started on the effect the Internet has had on good writing.

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Sometimes I wonder what happened to the guy who used to actually teach positive thinking and power of intention seven years ago.

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Sometimes I wonder where I will go after my time in Ukraine is finished. (and whether that time is coming soon)

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Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like if I had stayed in the project management company and never come to Ukraine in the first place.

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For that matter, sometimes I wonder where I would be now if I had stayed in the navy for 20 years and gotten that lifetime, half-salary retirement package.

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And taking it even further, sometimes I wonder what would have happened if my parents had let me take piano lessons as a child like I wanted and not made me play the stupid trumpet.

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Sometimes I wonder whether we really have free choice in life. Are we all simply fated to make the choices we make and follow the paths we follow? Or are there really completely different life journeys for us, perhaps in an alternative universe?

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Sometimes I wonder if I’m as good a person as I imagine myself to be.

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Sometimes I wonder if I’m as bad a person as I imagine myself to be.

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And that’s enough for this edition. It’s time to get back to writing real stuff.

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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