Sunday, July 26, 2009

Something From Nothing

In econ this year (trust me this has a point so don't close the window or go to facebook instead -_-) we learned about something called the money multiplier effect. The money supply increases in a few different ways, the most interesting of them being by lending and borrowing in a credit system. By loaning out money lent to them by savers, banks artificially create more money.

This is actually sort of analogous (and me being me, I love a good analogy) to a principle I've strictly adhered to my whole life: don't take out your problems on other people. They don't deserve it, and it never makes your original problems any better.

It's like the money multiplier. Someone or something injects you with negative emotion, and you don't just pass that on like currency to the next person; it still stays with you but then creates needless negativity. Just like there's no tangible good behind the artificially generated currency, the original event never had anything to do with blow that was dealt to the victim of somebody's inability to deal with their problems. Perry told us it's like we created something from nothing. Whether it's pain or money, such a thing shouldn't happen.

To be or not to be

How sad. It's Saturday night and I'm laying on a couch in my underwear with my laptop resting on my stomach, and the most socially active thing I'm doing is blogging. Strangely enough, I'm not really sad. Of course there's going to be (and there has been all summer) that nagging, antsy feeling that I should be getting the most out of my summer, spending every precious moment creating outstanding memories with friends and working on self-improving.

I really hate that feeling.

But it passes. Not to say I haven't done some of that, but honestly I've spent a large sum of time sitting on my ass reading manga, playing farmville, and listening to my itunes on shuffle. Oh and surprisingly I haven't been getting that much sleep, but that's irrelevant.

Now there's less than a month of summer left. I'm not lamenting that though. I'm more beaten up that I wasn't more honest the last 4 years of my life. Just now I'm embracing and accepting how much I love lounging around by myself, just like how I love stupid movies unimaginable in the film canon and silly manga that don't have a shred of realism in them. All of the things I thought a respectable person shouldn't love doing.

I think I would've been much happier had I let myself be--Hrm, why do we have to be "ourselves"? People say not to be other people, or who you think you should be, or who you think other people think you should think you should be, or any other confusing combination
of clauses, and they say "be yourself". Well I think you sort of lose yourself when you consciously decide who "yourself" is.

So I say just be. I look forward to just being during the next four years of my life.


Friday, July 10, 2009

Disappointment and Despair

I tried uploading this gif to facebook for my profile picture and it didn't dance around. i was sorely disappointed. -sigh- maybe i just fail at the internet. who knows. but it's unassailably cute. trust me.






it's a snippet from this video i think:

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Inadvertent Wisdom

I was watching a show where they make commentary on people who still think there are WMD's to be worried about. The character meant to be the caricature says "the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence!" This was meant to make him sound trite and like a tool, but I realized in a different context that statement can actually mean a lot.

This all came up when I was thinking about a discussion Karthik and I had about agnosticism vs atheism, and how despite the critiques of others we still staunchly believe that we're not just timid atheists but truly are agnostic. Because the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.