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if you could apply the random function to mircea himself, this is what you would probably get: links, and quotes, and thoughts, and pictures, and videos, about music, and computing, and history, and art, and future and past... pretty random stuff in general.
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Thou Shall Not Take Bananas for Granted
I went to the store today, and between others I quickly grabbed a kilo of bananas scanned them in a hurry, and dropped them in the basket. I love the self scanners; together with Spotify they remind me like nothing else that I live in the 21st century! No interaction with humans while you’re buying stuff and your soundtrack streams seamlessly straight from Sweden :)
And then it hit me. I have absolutely no feeling of thankfulness when I buy bananas. Nothing. Zilch. Nada. None. And you, my dear reader, probably you also don’t have any such feeling towards bananas. And maybe this serves you right, but for me it should not be like that.
Let me tell you a fragment of a story.
I grew up in communist Romania. The policy of the government was that the country will import less than it exports. They cut all kinds of expenses, including electricity and water, and that was not always pleasant. But in time, the country almost completely got rid of the foreign debt. This is laughable nowadays, when Romania like every government and even every local authority are borrowing money from financial institutions… but that’s another rant for another time.
In any case, because of this policy of not importing too much, and because bananas do not grow in Eastern Europe, we only saw the fruit for Christmas. That was the one time in the year when the government imported and distributed a scant quantity of bananas to the stores. People would queue for long hours to be able to buy. (In fact, I remember that the best strategy at the time was, if you saw a queue, to first sit in line, and then ask what are people waiting for. You would gain several places like this).
The bananas were also green and had to be home-ripen. Everybody knew at the time that bananas should be covered in newspapers, and left somewhere in warm temperature till they would ripe.
An apocryphal story says that once, my grandma received bananas from one of my uncles. And since she never saw anything like that before, she thought those were actually some weird cucumbers gone bad, so she fed the cows with them.
In any case, I’m digressing. The whole point of this time trip was for me to remind myself and to you dear reader to be grateful for being able to have bananas any time we like. (Don’t you find it funny how I am breaking the fourth wall here, like I would be Woodie Allen in Annie Hall, although I suspect I am talking alone anyway?).
So yes, I think we should all remember, every now and then, where are we coming from, and be thankful for it. Sure the bananas are just a very simple example, and metaphor. There are many other things that I need to remind myself to be thankful for, things that I nowadays I take for granted and I could not even imagine having them some time ago.
And if you think that bananas are trivial, then I’ve got news for you: I have an even more basic reason to be thankful. And this one is an actual holiday for me.
Two years ago, in August 2014, I attended a conference in Vienna for one week. Unbeknownst to me, I ended up contacting a terrible pain in my neck. The moment I would try to look up, I would feel this horrible pang in my neck. I could not turn my neck. I could not walk. I could not enjoy anything, because of the pain.
I went to the pharmacy, and described the horrible situation in which I was. The kind lady there, recommended a warm patch, and I think I burned her down with my gaze at that moment trying to convey the following: “i’m dying here woman, and you’re recommending me a warm patch?”. You see, I was convinced that what I got was some injury to my vertebrae or something really horrible. Long story short, with the warm patches, in two days, my neck eventually recovered.
For the remaining two days, my biggest pleasure was to simply walk around and turn my head. Using my neck without the pain was a joy I hadn’t experienced in a long time.
We don’t know what we have, until we lose it. And that’s ok. The thing which really bothers me is that once we get it back, we still too easily forget.
So, to make sure that I don’t forget, or that if I forget, I will remember every now and then of the times when I thought I was doomed to never look up again, I have decided that for me, August 25 will be the “Day when my pain in neck went away” day, which I will observe yearly.
And now that I’m writing this I wonder when should I institute the Banana Day as a the next personal holiday.
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Video
youtube
Frankl - Regard man as what he could be. Search for meaning.
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Text
The Course of Empire
The following 5 paintings are a series of paintings by Thomas Cole, an american painter of the 19th century. See how the view shifts slightly: in every picture the mountain (which looks a bit like the swiss Matterhorn :) is seen from a different viewpoint. And the time of the day is different, starting with morning and ending with evening. Somehow it reminds of life…
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Quote
"Abundance made it possible to extend the quest for self-realization from a minute fraction of the population to almost the whole of it."
Robert Fogel
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Link
speed up. slow down. raising pitch. falling pitch. chanting. shouting. all these are the tools of the rhetoritician.
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Link
wow! silver british physicist discovers a way of changing the curvature of the lenses, which filled with water, can adapt to the needs of 90% of people who need glasses.
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Link
Tom Otterness >> playground... looks like a really fun thing to do... would like to learn how to do it one day!
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Quote
why the lucky stiff (often known simply as why or _why) is the persona of a prolific writer, cartoonist, musician, artist, and computer programmer notable for his work with the Ruby programming language.
why the lucky stiff (wikipedia)
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