Category: Personal

Categories
Creative Writing Personal Philosophy

On Poetry Month – Poem 3.

As my ongoing commitment to Poetry Month I bring you a poem inspired by my current fascination with the singularity.

I tried to write this in the style of E.E. Cummings and while it’s not up to snuff compared to him. I do think it has some caché to it.

Love in 2552

I do think when

We do merge (inevitably-finally)

With machines

We will not lose – the ability to

Love

 

Consider the works-innovations-breakthroughs

Fueled solely by

Love

 

The spectrum of emotions

Fully realized only by

The ebb and flow of

Love

 

That’s why

Though a virus at times

As machines we will be

With a heart and still with – the ability to

Love


Categories
Personal Philosophy

On Science v. Love.

Well, it seems like it is that time again. It wouldn’t seem right to not have a a few musings on love show up on this site. I don’t think I have had a proper one in some time. Hopefully my experiences since then in Love and in English make this a more palatable experience.

So, Love, right? Despite appearances I actually consider myself quite the romantic; on that same token I consider myself quite the scientist. Put side by side the two are at odds with one another. Science is cold and calculating, emotionless and logical. Love is crazy and wild, all the cards on the table, reckless. How can these two live harmoniously without being at odds? Well, in short, they can’t. (You thought I was going to give you a reason why they can, weren’t you?) This does not mean that a person with feet firmly planted in both camps can’t live without a massive amount of cognitive dissonance. It just takes some work.

Science allows us to view the world in a way that is objective. As humans we are inherently emotional. These can and often do cloud the ways we view things. For purposes of this example, think of a time when you were sleeping alone, perhaps all along in a big house with no one else around. There was probably a time during that experience when you got a little spooked for reasons that are not entirely based in reality. Science does not allow one to think that way. That’s why I love Science and I base almost every belief I have on it. It is completely logical and makes sound decisions based on data and evidence. But…

How boring would it be to live a life, a human life, only through the lens of the scientific method. To me, as humans, we are given this amazing ability to express and experience emotions. That is why I leave love up to this side of my psyche. Sure, there is science that explains why and how we feel the way we do. You could read it (which I have) and fully understand that love in and of itself is a biological process that is primarily used for procreation, but that is too much for me. We are sentient beings capable of thought. We can control our baser instincts and extrapolate more from them as well. I am driven by love, and I dare say I’m not alone. Most of humanities most beautiful arts are expressions of love, be it new love or loss. This is something that I can’t imagine would have happened if we fully understood what drives us as humans and rejected every impulse.

Love is fickle though. If you live by the sword you also die by the sword, and that means opening yourself to myriad other emotions that may impede your life. The great thing is though by allowing yourself to be hurt you also allow yourself to experience some of the greatest joys that human kind can experience. That is the reward of all this. This is why I will continue searching and why I can not let science interfere. I would be lying if I said I haven’t made some dumb choices that absolutely defy logic for the pursuit of love, but do I regret it? Well, yeah some of it, some of them were really stupid mistakes. That doesn’t mean I am going to stop though. To quote a favorite, if not completely cheesy lyric, “I love love, I love being in love, I don’t care what it does to me.”

Categories
Personal

On Michelle.

Michelle

This has been in the hopper for a long time and I haven’t really had a chance to get around to it until now. Especially because this was actually relevant about 3 months ago. It’s about the loss of a dear friend of mine. Before you go off the deep end, it’s not a human friend, nor an animal friend, but a friend of the computer persuasion. Her name was Michelle and she was a Lenovo Thinkpad T61p. This might seem a little over-sentimental for something as replaceable and as frequently changing as a computer, but just as the stuffed animal that you can’t seem to give away, it’s the memories that give it its inherent sentimentality. Let me give you a little background as to why it meant so much to me.

When I started college my parents were ardent in their conviction of not getting me a computer. To this day I am not exactly sure why. The cost of a computer is not something to be scoffed at, but seeing as my major was/is computer engineering, one would think that this might be something worth the investment. I really wanted a laptop so I would be able to bring it around campus and take notes and study in the library, you know college stuff. The only thing I had at the time was an aging desktop and that wasn’t going to cut it. I was working as a tech support goon for a local publishing company at the time and they had this dilapidated, stripped, broken, and all together homely looking “laptop” in the back of the shop and I asked if I could adopt this shelter computer. They obliged and I spent the next months getting it in working order. It was old though, to put it into context, it was old for then, no built-in wifi, IDE HDD, 1 GHz Pentium III proc, it was a dog. At least I had a laptop though, but it was glaringly apparent that this was not going to be able to slake my computing thirst for long though.
My parents struck me a deal, if I got into the engineering program (I didn’t start in it due to high school GPA) they would fork over the cash for a new computer. After two years of busting my hump I was accepted and I immediately began to look at shiny, new laptops. I ended up finding a great deal on a beast of a laptop (at the time of course) through my dad’s AMEX reward program.

This was over Christmas break I ordered it and I remember refreshing the tracking number roughly a quadjabamillion times. I’m pretty sure the IT people at FedEx were about ready to block my IP. It was a little torturous waiting day in and day out in hot anticipation of my new best friend. I was comping back from doing some errand I had to run and I saw, sitting on my doorstep, a relatively large cardboard box, be-speckled with the Lenovo logo. I sprinted to the door and tore into that box, you know in a totally civil and organized manner as to not break my new god.

It was love at first boot. I had so many good times with Michelle. (I have a penchant for naming all my important things girls names that start with M) She helped me get through some really tough classes. She is where I learned Linux really well. She is where I learned the anatomy of a modern laptop. She was where I wrote some heart to hearts and where I blogged some really fun moments. Sadly, in December of 2010 she died,   it sounded like an overheating issue with the GPU, but she wouldn’t boot. I replaced her motherboard and got her working, but she was showing her age, and it was time to move on. I sold her to a nice Indian family who needed her right way. I want to thank her for he many years of service and just how many great memories I shared with her. Bye Michelle!
Who writes a love letter to a computer? This guy. This. Guy.