teachers

In communication, it is the messenger's responsibility to ensure that the intended recipient hears the message being conveyed.

However, when called upon to make a value judgement between ensuring that the message is heard as intended vs. understood as intended, many messengers, with very noble messages in their trust, fail to choose the latter.

The black box that transforms what we hear into what we know is the final arbiter of perceived truth.

At the altar of futile nobility lies many an endeavor; burnt offerings to the love of form over function.

If the intended recipient of a message does not receive it, does the delivery of said message warrant any merit in and of itself?

Is it virtue to simply consign our thoughts to their intended destinations and hope veritas will speak for itself?

brushfire

i just got back from seeing avatar, and it's insane to see the parallels between the movie's symbolism and my thoughts from the past two weeks. in my head, i've been revisiting the culture of the native americans and their approach to interaction with nature, thinking about building infrastructure that's forward-compatible and what really makes a society "advanced". got home, and my mom asked me to read a chapter from a book called "talent is overrated". more developmental insights. as a result, my brain was absolutely on fire for about forty-five minutes; however, i was asked to clean up upstairs and wasn't allowed to let my thoughts out properly. the fire is gone, now. i wonder: does that means they've been resolved, or lost?

the biggest loser

yesterday was the first time in my entire life that i've used "proper channels" to try and accomplish something in a bureaucracy. amazingly enough, it's also the first time i'll have succeeded. pretty big milestone, i think. just some unorthodox tactics* and direct human-to-human communication helped a lot, because it allowed the administrator in question to get a steady stream of highly relevant information in a short, convenient span of time. time, as it turns out, is really the biggest issue here.

i read somewhere that the most significant problem inherent to bureaucracies is their need to describe people, reductively, with numbers, because there's so much information required for each individual person's component of every decision a given bureaucracy will make. upon reading that, what struck me next was a little surprising: the sheer descriptive power of numbers is amazing! if a picture's worth a thousand words, how much more is a good set of numbers worth?

the government seems to quickly earn the ire of a large portion of the general public, because of all the administrative quicksand that remains in its systems. however, no one seems to suggest the idea that economics and statistics be given more priority in school. as a democracy, for our voters to make informed decisions without sacrificing an inordinate amount of their time, they must understand statistics and the principles of economic thought. otherwise, the only citizens that'll have a shot at becoming informed political participants will be those who make "becoming informed" their full-time occupation.

i have a dream: that one day, our government will decide to go on an information diet. and that at some later date, we can look around us at the rest of the world and say, hey, would you look at that. our government's the biggest loser.

*making an appointment with the principal's secretary, despite the fact that the principal is always up and about the school, ostensibly available for comments or concerns.

do you want a...

there are people who believe they can change the world. i've met a few. they're all very passionate.

some almost to a fault. you know you've got a problem when stepping back to see the big picture requires losing sight of even the important details.

"revolutionary":

milk for the bones and blood for the banners

honey for the tongue, oh, sing me an anthem, baby

i'm gonna break your world in two

set it spinning like a top til it all falls down on you

revolution after turn, watch the incense burn

the bourgeosie's smoking second-grade potpourri

oh, baby, i'm a revolutionary

2010

no cider or soda, so we improvised. watched a steve reich documentary instead of watching the ball drop. i think i got the better end of the deal.

2008 was the year i discovered music, people, and what it feels like to grow. 2009 is the year i went too far with both, and figured out what i want to do with my life. ostensibly, 2010 is the year i start doing what i want to do with my life.
good stuff.
we'll see how this goes.