Wednesday, January 21, 2009

EVERYTHING IS AMAZING, no one is happy

The age we live in, come on people paaalease. We have so much, and it is as though the world owes it to us. The other day I drove to Utah from Colorado (a trip that would take months of planning and preparation to start, and a month or two to complete) and I managed it in 8 hours. During the trip, on a clear night after a storm rolled through, the temperatures in Wyoming dropped who knows how low and the temperature gauge in the car drops below the line. I guess the term would be over cooling. I might be the first to experience it and will thus name it heater not working, teeth shivering, spine contorting cold effect, HNW for short. So HNW kicks in and i have no idea what to do. I pull over and call the one man I know that can fix all problems, my dad. He remembers a time when he was in college and he experienced the same problem and to solve it blocked the air flowing into the engine compartment to keep the engine running warmer. So I pulled the floor carpets out of the back seat and put them between the radiator and the grill and continued my journey at 65 miles an hour without the heater until i arrived. Worried, not at all, I had a nice sleeping bag on board and would have easily pulled over and slept through the night to wait for warmer daylight to travel. I was a little prepared. But I started thinking about how relatively easy and unproblematic that travel was compared to what some people have to go through. People ask me how i can do that sort of travel (as i make it a point to make as many random trips as possible) and not get totally bothered by it. It does bother me. But it helps to mentally think of people doing that sort of thing all over the united states all the time. I watched a show about a Bolivian family recently that hikes for three days in the highest parts of the world, sometimes losing their sandals, while wrestling llamas strapped with bricks of salt, with negative degree nights, only to ship salt to a few small villages way out of the way and exchange it for some fruits and vegetables for their own village. Is that not crazy? Why do we let ourselves get so upset over the stupidest things, oh my phone is taking forever! "Its going to space, give it a second". Below i will post a link to a video that embodies my point if my rambling does not make any sense. Its late. Awesome trip to Utah, fun as well as productive as we have a warehouse there and I was able to see our shipment and get excited about that. Also nice to run into Utah friends and enjoy the thrills of Salt Lake. Sawadee, Thai food, succulent shrimp and those noodles that are so easy to lose, in your mouth.

So the link is not working, but he talks about how rotary phones where crazy and not too old, but we would get bugged by people with two zeros in their number cause that meant you had to go all the way around. Or how phones have hiccups when we do not realize that the signal is going to space! And yet we get so upset. Or how traveling is always followed with a day of recovery like it was the worst thing to have ever happened to you. When traveling from New York to California used to take thirty years and some one would die or someone would have a baby and you would end up being a completely different group when you got there. Now you watch a movie, take a crap and your there. Or flight, the miracle that is sitting on a chair in the sky, people should be freaking out every time, OHHH WERE FLYING!!!, but it does not go back that far. Or even on the plane they have just come out with high speed Internet on the plane and it stops working for a second and the guy next to him, gets all bent out of shape because of it, like the world instantly owes him something. Anyway its Louis CK interview with one of the late night funny guys. Its good and I know i cant do it justice.

Oh another point that I speculate about is our interaction with each other. When was the last time you got a letter from someone. How much cooler is a letter than an email right? Its a living contact. Effort was put into it. How much of today's society is based on nonliving contact with other people. I am man enough now to admit that at one point in my life I watched a few episodes of stargate sg1 and in one of those it shows the human race unable to communicate with other humans face to face, they all relied on computer interface. Anyway, how dead of a way is that to be a part of others lives. Or that sometimes we think to call someone and then hesitate because we might bother them. Chances are they would love to hear from you two, and are thinking the same thing. Or maybe the fact that we are overwhelmed with keeping in touch with two many people. Where do we focus our human interaction? How do we make more living connections with people? Anyone, please... love to hear it.

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