Tag Archives: human condition

appreciations

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this year for Thanksgiving ( and why not also for each and every day ) take some moments to simply appreciate life

life is such a mysterious experience

one which i hope we’ll never Scientifically truly understand in the least

to try and understand life too much is to miss out on: the actual experience; and actually tuning in well enough to appreciate that experience of human ( among other forms of ) life

see if you can appreciate, too, all aspects of our experience together

up and down

good and bad

we are wed to life in all of its wonder and chaos, in all of its highs and lows — so try and appreciate and accept all that life offers us, even when it feels unfair or broken or wrong

this year i appreciate life — i choose to tune into that channel of human energy in a personally meaningful way

 

we almost lost our mother this year

i have a lot of questions for her, about her behavior, about her constant struggles with mood and escape and negativity and then manic joy

not all of these questions will be exactly smooth or supportive

i can feel ( in an unfortunately negative and low / sad way ) the immense power of our socially collected energies as a human organism — my mother’s purposefully-chosen attempts at the ultimate escape can be nothing but a dark and dreary ripple of hopelessness and confusion — a horrific example to ‘put out there’ for anyone in the world

it shows a lack of appreciation for life, for people, for anyone and anything beyond herself

my empathy for her obviously wanes at this point in the aftermath

but, for the rest of us at least, let’s hold on to life

we are all very vulnerable and life can escape us all on its own at any moment

there are no logical systems or reasons, either, that death needs to adhere to

so let’s appreciate life together

let’s set a good example for the world and the people we love

let’s appreciate each other with a new sense of closeness and humanity

tune into little things when time gets dark

tune into life

{ over } extended-body

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The desire to locate the self simply within a particular biological body is no longer meaningful. What it means to be human is being constantly redefined. For me, this is not a dilemma at all.

Excerpt, Stelarc discussing the redefinition of what it is to be human from Extended-Body: Interview with Stelarc

just in case you were wondering

we’re all just trying to figure this shit out

its only when you start to try and understand the world using your entire body and mind that you begin to touch upon the universal — that wonderful and utter simultaneous beauty and misery of our existence here on earth that melt together as the very molten crux of the human condition

our bodies and minds have the unexplicable divine power to emotionally heal inconsistencies that were directly baked into our experience of the natural world and we all face an individual struggle that can sometimes feel so incredibly lonely and insurmountable, but by living a life that follows the heart and mind through creative expression we reach out to one another and break the discontinuity of our individualities: through feeling; through emotion; through wordless, pure vibration

this is when we start to comprehend a bigger picture and when we can begin to realize the fragile interdependence of humanity — that we are not just a collection of organisms scattered on a ball of dirt and mud and piss, somehow left to fend for our solitary disparate survival in little patches — but instead we are really one people: a living, breathing ball of flesh and blood and emotion — a sort of liquid emotion

if you tune in, if you really focus and start developing a greater personal awareness of the world, you’ll start to learn about these connections — connections that can be at once miraculous and joyful and at other times completely horrifying, sullen, too real — and no matter how hard we might all try to scientifically prove the empirical reality we all see, hear, think and breathe, it is only the nearly hopeless and desperate struggle to try and express our emotionality that touches the truth behind all of this shit to break through to another world, to the other side, let’s say, to feel the spiritual continuity of our collective existence through the heightened perspective of our individual inexistence

this is not a book

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just a simple thought to share — does the name of Barnes and Nobles’ newish reading device ‘the nook’ in a near-literal sense imply the phrase ‘not a book’

 

i know, i know … its probably more of a metaphor for a little reading nook, right? something you might set up for a kid at home, a little shelf for her / his books and a cozy Spongebob chair or something … i get it, but when i think of the physical space of a Barnes and Noble Bookstore i guess i don’t think of anything all that inviting and small … the very brand they’ve established over the last 10 years while destroying the bookselling industry vertical feels a little more along the lines of a slightly more intimate version of Costco, its more of a warehouse of books, and mostly the bestsellers at that

and now we have this ‘nook’ — this mini-digital anti-book of sorts, or maybe better yet, this little anti-Barnes and Noble device living and breathing in the very heart of more and more of these warehouse cemeteries for what the book used to be

you can still come in and get your Grisham, your Oprah’s Cookbook, your Chelsea Lately product or the Shades of Grey book, the Hunger Games … go ahead, go get ’em

but you’ll get a better deal if you buy ’em online — i don’t quite understand what that is, but i even recently decided to buy ‘Claes Oldenburg: The Sixties’ from bn.com because it was more than $20 cheaper than what i found on the shelves of an independent bookstore in the physical world — i don’t know how or why they do that, this offering up of the goods at almost a third off when shopping online

is it re-training incentive? maybe Barnes and Nobles wants me to buy more and more of my readerly consumptables via online distribution and delivery mechanisms? is it cheaper, really cheaper, for them to sell us thy daily goods online? i’m just wondering outloud here … hmmmmm

i should really try out ‘the nook experience’ — as an experience designer i should really enter that vast new central ‘Apple Store inside a store’ thing they’ve got goin’ on and really give Barnes and Nobles little nooks a whirl, right? see what its like to read a book on a tablet device that’s specifically made for readers — i’m sure i will someday, someday soon perhaps — i’m sure i’ll bring my Fuji point and shoot and document the entire experience, including any human to human interactions that ensue whenever a camera gets involved — but for now, i’m still wrestling with this incredible strange nook invasion — i mean, its right there in the middle of the store! — and to top it all off, the room our little nook nooks seem to take up in most Barnes and Nobles replaced actual bookish inventory and more often than not any music section { i guess this would more likely be called the CD and DVD department? } — so now, with Borders Bookstores gone, the big, monster bookstore that took the world by storm over the last decade or 2, totally crushing independent bookstores and subsuming what were once more independently-run university and college bookstores, now the megastore of books and all things intellectual { ha ha } gives us these toys, these digital relaxation toys for adults, well, mostly for teens and young twentysomethings — and they expand their toy department to at least twice the previous size, er, ehm, i mean, i guess i should say their chiildren’s section — the paradigm is basically flipped now, what we have is a gift shop with some books in the periphery, oh, and a coffeeshop with no plugs to potentially keep your nooks nicely charged while you order from the nookstore in the clouds