las vegas sucks

no, seriously. it holds no appeal to me. i feel as though that's a pretty good statement to make. gambling, tits, booze. irrelevant.

education as the practice of freedom

learning is a dynamic experience predicated on the relationship between many components. the teacher contributes, the materials contribute, the time contributes, the other students contribute, i contribute. in so much as i recognize my role within the classroom, i must make changes in my habits in order to improve the quality of my educational experience.

i've always been interested in the power of learning, and the energy a new experience or new knowledge can generate. cultivating those emotions on a regular basis should greatly improve my time spent in the classroom. "education as the practice of freedom," as bell hooks names it, focuses on the liberating force of learning. certainly, her experiences as a black female struggling through the education system decades ago are immensely different than my own school experiences. white, male, financially secure. these differences do not predicate any difficulty in applying her attitudinal strategies.

the classroom must be, for hooks, an exciting place. why not? clearly, this is a positive emotion, and if the learning environment is full of it then interest and participation must be enhanced. each individual contributes to this emotional environment. to be brief, my contributions to the classroom affect the quality of education that transpires.

this coming semester i must make an effort to, regardless of the other contributing factors, ensure that my end of the bargain is held up. i am not superhuman, that is to say i don't think my efforts would be able to lift an abjectly spirited classroom into a positive state. but, i should try. participation, engagement, contribution, questions, must all be consistent.

my education is mine to shape.

nomads and lead heart

mom was telling me about a david suzuki documentary she recently watched. ?ian davidson? is an anthropologist who has been following the few remaining nomadic families in, presumably, the amazon. evidently, only several of these families remain; logging has drastically changed their cultures, their lives, their souls even. without the tree species they had come to count on (trees that are part of their family in my opinion) they were unable to build shelter.

the reason i find this fascinating is not because of the fact that these people are no longer going to exist. i cannot come to terms with the idea of nomadism fading away. this is going to reek of naive green enthusiasm, but that lifestyle seems to contain many important environmental and mental components. it is in the loss of those components that i am truly sad.

the habit of calling the entire natural environment your home no longer exists. one of the mothers in these families was shown breastfeeding a baby monkey whose mother had been killed. my mental reaction to the appropriateness of that act is culturally embedded and ultimately irrelevant, however i think it's a powerful example of how tightly that culture is tied to the environment. i'm certain that there are countless examples of this mentality.

environ-mental. the conscious relationship between the environment and our minds is fittingly encompassed within the word itself. even more fittingly, without the environ.. only mental is left. mental as in crazy. what does it do to a person to have their entire attitude of livelihood destroyed? these people must be accustomed to constant change; reacting to their surroundings, moving on when the dynamics in the area they are settled shift or when food is scarce. now, they are forced to stagnate. the documentary showed -- or so i am told, the fact that i haven't actually seen this may make all these thoughts pointless -- a stirring scene that spoke volumes about the effects of this stagnation on the mind. the anthropologist described the people as very peaceful, and yet, facing the erosion of their lifestyle, they had set a curse upon the loggers. placing two logs of wood from the trees they use for their homes into the ground, they erected a spear between them. this was supposedly to indicate that death would befall anyone who passed through the gate. when faced with death, the family constructed a warning of death. curses aside, the act holds an interesting larger significance in my mind. it seems some sort of karmic warning; you have caused our death, and we wish the same upon you, or we hope the same fate shall befall you.

the full effects of these changes also manifested themselves physically. the families that had settled into permanent shelter were becoming ill. perhaps the lack of a constantly changing environment, food, and all the physical interactions between those elements and the body, led to a similar bodily stagnation. our immune systems are supposedly strengthened through repeated exposure to small doses of substances. what if this same sort of effect was now missing in their lives?

in a global sense, this discussion triggered a familiar worry. i struggle with my own relationship with the environment, and am certain that there are people who currently cannot even claim to have such a relationship. if we feel no connection to the earth, how can we live without destroying it. or, if we can live without destroying it, i don't think we can live to improve it. when i see pictures of the far reaching effects of Deepwater Horizon i get the same leaden weight in my chest. every time some act brings me hope, it seems to be dashed shortly after. we are constantly throwing more rocks in the well than we are taking out. sooner or later we simply won't be able to draw water anymore.

be the change. be it, sterling.

jesus was a zombie

seriously. he was killed, rose again three days later, and then consumed living flesh going on a terrible rampage for brains. while he didn't exactly get to the brains, he WAS always talking about eating my flesh and blood...

zombie jesus, bow to your saviour
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Zombie_Jesus

crevice hair and fruit placenta

about those crevice hairs.. more specifically bellybutton lint. why did i say hair? regardless, maybe the hair has something to do with picking up so much damn lint. the point is that if all that lint is coming off my shirt, why aren't there bellybutton sized holes in all my shirts? am i the only one who wonders why this isn't ruining my shirts?

i like when i slice tomatoes for a sammidge and the little glorpy parts fall out of the tomato slices. actually, i don't like that; i have to pick those suckers off the cutting board and they're tricky. the thing i like is that they resemble some sort of placenta or fetal pod. yum.

tired

would really like some time off. one weekend so far? come on, ive more than triple the amount of days i haven't worked so far. killin me here. early mornings this weekend, plus no days off. LOVE working 13 days in a row. beauty

my noosphere

our unique status as the only species that has ever become so populous but still remains able to interbreed is pretty fascinating. there are no other species of human. our evolution has been markedly different than any other species. perhaps there are other factors that prevent interbreeding; a different kind of speciation. it could be cultural. sometimes the distance between two jutting cliffs of person are too great to string a bridge across. radical muslims and revisionist hillbillies will never make love.

what influence does media have on the way our world is blending? de Chardin & Huxley wrote about a seeming unification of the noosphere, of the human psyche. not so explicitly, a hive mentality of sorts. east and west are blending. immigrants are rendering inbred cultural stubbornness a thing of the past. we share more than ever. the internet is a mystifying technological evolution, an appendage almost. a 4th dimensional limb that can greet and share and express. think avatar, the weird hair tentacles. (i'm ashamed to have made an avatar reference, but i go with what comes to mind.)

de Chardin has another cool idea about how the very nature of the earth that supports us is linked to our psychosocial intensification, or complex unity over time. because of its sphericity, ideas will encounter each other, link, form connections, and form a web. everything cool always relates to spiders i swear to gOD. "...the result will be an organised web of thought, a moetic system operating under high tension, a piece of evolutionary machinery capable of generating high psychosocial energy." cool. Huxley thinks that this sort of bound complexity is analogous to a cell membrane; all the contents can become more complex and unique within the bound environment.

he starts to lose me with "christogenesis" though. come on man, we had to go back to jesus? Huxley's got my back "I find it impossible to follow him all the way in his gallant attempt to reconcile the supernatural elements in Christianity with the facts and implications of evolution..." word.

two trends stood out to de Chardin: our movement toward extreme individuation, and toward interrelation and cooperation. such dichotomous movements suggest, to me, an elastic band being pulled too thin. but, then again, if we go back to de Chardin's spherical focus maybe these two movements are not in opposite directions. Maybe, they are toward each other; wrapping around in circles, building outward in a web.

this should be an interesting read. expand the noosphere!