Due to the typical schedule I work down here, I only meal I eat at my own apartment is breakfast.  I wake up late enough that there isn’t usually time for a lunch before leaving for work.  We also usually go out to eat on our “lunch” break, which is a dinner to most people.  I get home well after midnight and try to have a little snack before going to sleep.  That’s as much of a third “meal” as I get.

Yesterday I got some bananas as I was shopping.  It was completely spur-of-the-moment.  (Well, not entirely because a co-worker brought one in a few days before and the idea was in my head already.)

See how nutritious they look???  My mommy taught me well.  I do what I can to stay healthy and promote good habits for staying that way.

Well, not that well.  I can still have fun.

This time away from my previous world has brought things into a different focus.

Avid readers will know of my previous fixation on toothpaste.  I now have the means to get all the different kinds of toothpaste I want.  It feels good to have those options.

Along with the toothpaste we desired other qualities of life.  Some are even starting to fall into place.  In the past couple years I have kept my cosmic expectations fairly low.  I do this for practical reasons.  I know what I want, I know what my priorities are, and I plan to live a long life so there is no rush.  This has helped my general happiness too, as described in my previous post.

But things never work out as you plan.  That is something else I have always been aware of, but never really had to contend with.  Does this also apply to when things work out better then expected?  I have always accepted the things that happen to and around me which I have no direct control over.  (Because, I have no direct control over them.)  These days life has been such that I am just accepting all these wonderful things that happen to me just as I would some trouble or turmoil I would have to deal with.  My fail-safe for getting through anything is starting to catch false-positives.  (Just a little computer scientist reference there.)

What has this all caused?  Well, life still happens.  All these wonderful things still do and have happened.  The interesting part is that I don’t know how I feel about it all yet.  If I do know how I feel about it, I don’t know if that is how I should feel, or will end up feeling about it.  I am aware of the fact that once this c’est la vie attitude wears off I may feel something different.  Is that normal?  If there were hypothetically other people out there who reacted to good and bad fortune in the same way like this, would this all be normal?

The worst part about it all is that there is a delayed ultimate reaction to everything.  I can think about and mull over anything to my hearts content, but I am in the end stuck waiting on the sidelines for my heart to make up its final decision.

Again, no worries.  No rush.  What will happen will happen and I’ll deal with that too.  Eventually.

I would like to note to the bulk of the handful of readers out there that this is all meant to be somewhat vague.  The exact specifics are not mentioned in here as to not clutter up the rest of the discussion.  Also, they are not mentioned here because I haven’t decided yet how I ultimately feel about them.  Oh bother…

This is one of those post ideas I came up with months ago.  Actually, just the title and general idea I came up with.  All this text is new.  Because of all the elapsed time between concept and reality, take the title as more of a metaphor then anything literal.

I’ve always been a happy kid/person.  (I don’t believe kids are people.  That’s another topic.)  In my entire memory (and I have memories daing back to age 2) I cannot remember being exceptionally depressed for more then a day.  It was not until much more recently in my life that I realized this is not the way for all, or even most people.  Why that is is again a different topic.  What I’d like to discuss this evening is what I believe is responsible for this overall outlook.  I see these things in myself and I don’t see them often, or at all, in the people I meet and mentally evaluate.  I will apologize now for the elitist attitude this probably will end up having.

1. Compartmentalized thought process. This may take a bit of practice for some, but you can divide your mind into compartments or categories or sections or whatever you want to call them.  The point is that you are able to identify where one issue ends and another starts.  This is something you have to maintain just about at all times or else things can start to blur together and you will have trouble separating them in the future.  At this point it may sound like I am taking the analogy too far but in fact I’ve been talking literally for the last 3 sentences.  As you are dealing with one issue, you do not want to be worried about something else which in reality has no ties to the issue at hand.  Programmers do this all the time to better understand what they have to do.  It makes things easier to comprehend when there isn’t so much so look at.  It applies perfectly to programming and to life in general.  Even when two issues may in reality be connected and/or originate from the same place, your thought processes do not have to be merged.  You can consider one problem on its own before beginning to consider something else.  This ties into number 4 below, prioritization.
2. Detach from yourself. This is something that can be very bad.  You see it in TV or movies sometime, where the character is some part delirious, part schizophrenic and exists in the show as either comedy relief or as some statement about intra-personal turmoil.  Often this character is played by Summer Glau.  What I mean by it is that you would be well served by the ability to be aware of all the things around you and all the things in your mind, but not attached to them to let them affect how you handle anything else.  This is not a mental state you would stay in all the time, but only when mentally dealing with problems or anything else that can lead you to stress, fear, worry, etc…  The ultimate truth is that all those emotions are over something you may or may not have control over, but in any case do not have control over now.  If you can do something about it, you would be doing it.  If you haven’t thought of what you can do yet, starting the worry or fear now is just going to make things exponentially worse.  So just detach from it.  For those with only a beginners level of mental-self-reprogramming ability, you can pretend that you are someone else trying to solve your issue.  This entire mindset leads to a much faster and clearer thought process.  And that’s what you need.
3. “All-ways look on the briiight side, of life!” One of my favorite Monty Python music numbers aside, it is never a bad thing to recognize something positive.  If not positive then non-negative.  (This is where I have to put the computer scientist in me aside, where there are only the two options.)  Everything is a murky shade of gray.  That’s the way the world is.  Unfortunately, the universe and nature and people are not programmed in binary so there will always be more then one way to look at something.  Even when the situation prevents you from taking immediate comfort in the brighter outlook you have recognized, it will at the very least be something you can look back on in the future to prevent that point in time from being a total black spot in your life.
4. Prioritize everything. This does not have to be an entirely conscious effort, but you can be aware of how one thought or issue is more or less important then another.  Especially when you are feeling overloaded by whatever issues you are dealing with at the moment, you need to be able to not only compartmentalize, but also to recognize what you should do first.  That is the beginning of any plan, and a plan means a goal for happiness and success.  (Unless you plan to be miserable.  Then you should seek a better source of self help then blogs.)  When you can recognize the different facets of your situation, you can see what needs to be done first and how that will help everything else.  Additionally, if you are an O.C.D.-mathematician like me, you get great pleasure out of discovering the shortest path between two points, be them physical, mental or emotional.
5. Trust yourself. Arrogance is like this, but on the outside.  On the inside, in your mind, this means that you have made a promise to yourself to always trust something you have previously decided.  Now of course this does not mean you can’t change your mind or re-evaluate or something like that.  This means that you will not do those things needlessly.  You will actually take action on something you have already decided to do.  Not only does this prevent stagnation, but it encourages a more adventurous and laze-fare attitude.  This can also be a great source of stability in your life, even when nothing else it.

Marginally-clever title’s aside, this isn’t a statement of things that will always work for everyone.  I however have found these to be great truths in my life.  From these ideas and others along the same line of thought, I feel comfortable that I can handle anything, and that I will always be able to do so.  I have no idea what the future may hold, even a mere 2 years from now.  I am not worried, however.  The last 22 years, 10 months and 2 days have prepared me to the point where everything else from this point on is possible.

So, things have changed in the last several months.  I finished my third/second quarter at RIT.  (how do you count a class durring summer quarter?)  With all that out of the way I’m not on co-op working for Cisco in their CALO lab.  (Think of a really cool internship you get college credit for, for those  non-RIT people out there.)  I start Monday.  I’m just about all settled in my new apartment in Morrisville, NC.  (didn’t I just move to Henrietta in the last post?!)  I may post pictures of my new place here.  I’ll decide later on how large a scope I want to brag on.

In these last several months as all this was happening I’ve gotten lots of ideas for posts here.  Some nice yummy topics for us all to chew over.  (it’s about lunch time for me at the moment.)  I even started a few draft posts to get some ideas down.  I think over my 9 months down here I’ll be making a concerted effort to come by here more often and write some more.  Sort of like an online journal of me and my thoughts in this new era of existence.  (did that sound too grand?  too corny?  probably.)

People keep telling me I’ll do well down here.  Either I’ve done a really good job over selling myself or I am some kind of technological prodigy child.  Or something in between.  I’m leaning towards the latter half of that spectrum.  Hope someone’s out there to watch me stumble through it all.

This was the first assignment given in my “Networking Fundamentals” class.  We were asked to write a short fiction story describing how we believe devices communicate on a network.  It was not graded but used as a way for the professor to get a feeling of how much we know about networking before we got into the course material.  I perhaps took the assignment too seriously, or not serious enough.  You decide.

The land of Kinterneon exists apart from yours and mine.  It is a world which follows a strict yet completely foreign set of protocols.  The inhabitants are uniquely talented in the ways of multitasking and optimizing their efficiency.  With these skills they are able to evolve and develop with astonishing speed.  In-fact, their entire existence has come to be and developed to what it is today in just the last 40 years.

Kinterneon is divided regions, which are added and removed at to fast a pace to count.  These regions exist to allow their regional administrators preside over their domains with better focus and grace.  A region is totally autonomous, much like individual countries are in our world.  They have the ability to manage all their own affairs however they may see fit, while still being able to interact with other regions.

Communication in Kinterneon is one of the peoples proudest, and oddest, achievements.  For a region to convey a message to another region, the message has to first be brought to an interface junction on the periphery of their territory.  From there the message is broken up into smaller chunks and each chunk packaged with information such as the source, destination and a count of the number of places the package has traveled through.  All of these packages are then numbered in sequence and then sent through a very large tube to a central switching authority.  Each switching authority manages incoming and outgoing messages for a set few regions.  They are neutral when it comes to region affiliation and they will route messages from their sender to the desired recipient without bias.  In some cases, when a messages intended destination is not within the scope of address served by the authority, the message has to be sent to a planetary master authority.  There are nine of these master authorities in Kinterneon, aptly designated K-1 through K-9.  (See “A Tale of a Doctor and His Phone Box” for a wondrous journey with the K-9 authority.)  Each of these master authorities have direct connections with each other via very fat pipes.  In a world where communication is so very important, this level of redundancy has proved useful in the past.  The master authorities keep records of the ranges of addresses accessible from all of the other switching authorities connected to them.  With this information they are able to route any unknown package to its ultimate destination.  If a package’s included travel count gets increased beyond a particular limit however, the package and all of its data are discarded.  When a package ultimately arrives at its destination, the receiving region places it in an incoming buffer which holds all the communication chunks sent to them.  As contiguous pieces are received, they are reassembled in the labeled sequence to reform the original message.  The daemon is then free to act on the message in whatever manor he or she has been instructed to.

With the ever increasing volume and cleverness of the people of Kinterneon, they have become so adept at this communication method that they can even send images, audio, video and even thoughts and ideas encoded and broken up within their packages.  Many years ago a convention was convened to decided on a standard method of encoding and delivering such unique message contents.  The Regional Fairness Convention is the unifying force behind the diverse forms of communication now possible.

The cities within a region in Kinterneon can also communicate with each other in much the same way.  They follow the same protocols and format as regional communication, but just on a smaller scale, communicating city-to-city.  If a city wishes to communicate with another region, it only has to make a request of the interface junction controller at the edge of their region.

As you can see, the land of Kinterneon must be vast and full of wonder and innovation.  However, despite our differences, we here on Earth have learned a lot from their model.

I know how the game is supposed to end.  The main character (me, if you haven’t been following along) gets the girl in the end and they ride off into the (Martian) sunset together (in their hover car) to start a family together and live happily ever after.  (Some details filled in from personal fantasy.)  I look at myself and my peers, and I get the impression that I have a clearer picture of this then most.  Additionally, I seem to either be more worried, less concerned, or more sure of how I will achieve these life goals.  I have yet to come to a definitive conclusion on which of those three it is.

Popular belief is that I somehow acquire either (a) copious scholarships or (b) lots of debt to attend a college of my choice for several years, get a nice middle-class job afterwards with which I can manage any debt I may have, buy a house, car, wife, kids, and all the toothpaste I want.  But what if I can’t find all that on the store shelves?  What if, assuming for the moment that I manage to get to this fanciful point in life, I end up not finding the right car, or the right person, or the right brand of toothpaste.  Falling back to popular belief, I would “move on.”  Settle for the peppermint when what I really wanted was wintergreen.  (they never have wintergreen these days…)  Personally, I refuse to settle.  I am willing to “make due with what I have” or to “improvise”, but I will never settle.  I know what I want, and one way or another, I will have it.  (even if I have to cut down my own wintergreen tree…)

But remember, we have assumed that I will be given the honor of being presented the choice of toothpaste or woman or car.  I still have to get that job with which to buy her/it.  (Lets pretend I’m referring to the car as “her” and save the slavery/prostitution implications for the next post.)  To get this job, I either have to be the luckiest person I know, or have to jump through all sorts of high-strung hoops to prove my worth.  Even when it seems like you will never get the degree or job you want.  Even when the fiscal and logistical requirements to get the degree or the job seem impossible.

I just have to keep on going.  Never ending, never waivering.  Or else, no toothpaste.

Today I was among some friends at a magic (Magic the Gathering, a trading card game) tournament. I started to talk about this sort of stuff, and the people I was talking to seemed to be completely foreign to these concepts. They stated that the common thoughts of an American are on the “important things” like money, sex, and food. Now, I am not going to dispute the importance of any of those three things. This society requires money to trade for other needs, sex is needed for procreation of the species, and food to sustain our biological bodies. But how can one’s life revolve around just that? How is that enlightened? What long term good does that serve?

About now you are probably thinking to yourself, “This loon sounds like he is trying to start a cult.” Well, that would be fun and all, but I have other obligations in my life at the moment. No time to become a spiritual leader. In any case, that isn’t the point here, but in a way I guess it is. What I am talking about is frame of mind. An awareness of who we are, what our minds can accomplish, our position in the cosmos. This does not require a conversion to a new spirituality, whatever one you have now will work just fine. It just requires some thought.

And that is the point of it all. If you are able to give things like this the thought, you have already started the “enlightenment.” If you are able to comprehend, understand, and even accept what I am talking about, then you have just proven to yourself that you have the mental ability of self-awareness. You have validated your sentience.

You have proven yourself to be a worthy reader of M.etaphysical E.xistance.