Break Your Mind

A random Philippino man spoke those words to me.  He also told me that "you have endurance and strength..please unite the the world.."  When did I become a cause that required support to lead myself to unite anything?  I can't even tie my shoelaces.

On another note, I made an assumption today I shouldn't have.  I assumed that the grand-daughter of an 80 year old white man would be white.  She was black and very pretty.

I have gas.

I am an NPC - Non-playable character.  I come into your party and do a lot of wonderful things for you and then leave.  Valuable, loyal and have a broad understanding with fresh eyes and outside perspectives, I enter into your team with full force.  And as quickly as I enter, I leave.

The bonds I form make a lasting impression to your party of adventurers.  It is hard for you to see me go.  The things I have done are amazingly quick and exceed expectations.  "How could we have done this without him," you wonder.  It is not easy, but you move on, thinking about how easily you could've rescued the princess with my help.

Alas, the nature of the NPCs is that we can only stay for so long - it was not planned out from the beginning for an NPC to stay with you.  There are tricks, however, into uniting an NPC to follow through the journey to completion.  The secret may require some technical gymnastics to complete a merge.  Making an NPC playable requires knowledge of the process behind the task.  It is usually very likely that plans are made for NPCs but the work is tedious to achieve.  Those who have used the secret knowledge to access an NPC are always happy with their results.

Some examples:

1. General Leo.  Wasn't he helpful at the base camp against Kefka?  Who else at the time was able to take on such a fiend?

2. Shadow and Interceptor.  A worthy ally against Kefka and evil.  Unlike Mog and Umaro, Shadow was difficult to keep.
3. Others I can't remember because access to the internet is limited at work.

Somebody asked today a very Miss USA type question: What would you do to change the world? Given the context of the conversation, the asker had a much deeper meaning associated to the question than a simple, "I wish for world peace and the end of world hunger."  The questioner was someone I would think is in a better position to do something than a small town girl with big breasts and an ability to do anything to be accepted as beautiful in the eyes of a misinformed public.

So what can I do to change the world?  I remember long ago when I started with browsing the internet and trying to develop my own website that I had a grand plot to destroy the world and rebuild.  As I've matured, I realize that the loss of the multitude of innocent would be too great to bear for a cleansing of the few meek devils that control the masses.  Changing the world from an individual perspective can start high or low.  When it comes down to what I'd want to do to step up to the plate, I'd rather see small, local changes.  There is no need to make large statements of change to a wide audience who have differing opinions.  A small group or committee can set ideals for their own community and decide on what's best.  I suppose the Government is always trying to apply this rule from Federal - Provincial - Municipal.  Does it work?  Do we have to break it down further into neighbourhoods and smaller communities?  I like community initiatives.

A sense of belonging goes a long way into developing a sense of the world, which in turn, helps (or hinders) making the world better.  Being of Asian decent, traveling throughout Asia and living there gave me a tremendous feeling of home and belonging that I've tried to feel in Canada.  The mono-culture of the Asian countries made me feel welcome and at the same time, there was a great curiousity for the "foreign" devils and their culture.  My respect for other cultures GREW by being in a smaller community.  I saw a different way of life that did not clash with my way of life. It also made me very proud of my own heritage.  It made me wish that everyone could feel this way.   There was no conflict of the self in my case.  I was in japan and their culture was different than Canadian culture but while I was living there, I did not feel imposed to follow their culture. In fact, I was encouraged to express my own.  Would that be possible in Canada?  Can a new person enter our society, be given the right to express their culture in ALL aspects of their lives and yet maintain a functional role in society?  I'm feeling that less and less.

At my current job, one of the first pieces of advice I received was that I was a big round ball and when I go to work, I have to take that ball and squish and cut away until I'm in a box.  The next thing I was told was to "think outside the box."  This did not make much sense to me.  I had to be in the box to be accepted to think outside of it.  I've spent the last 4 months thinking inside the box; my future in my current career path is fading away, unless I think outside the box that I've worked so hard to get in to.

The beautiful thing about writing is I can always change subjects halfway through a rant and rant about something else.  In order to try to avoid that, I'm going to cut myself out.  I'm showing you all a picture of my basement that I've been working hard to fix.  Aha!  I changed my mind, you can see my bike that I ride to work AND the new flooring at the same time.

Jamis commuter

I hear crickets through my computer.  What did TD72 put on my computer?  Well, now, isn't this cool?  I'm wondering about things that I don't understand and I put a blog title that is ridiculous.  What did I learn today?

Not much.  I guess I'm just supposed to write a random and hope for a topic to enter my mind.  I'm supposed to be breaking some minds but today, and for the past few months, I've been so confined to a conformist view of life that it's hard to break my mind.  I think I'm breaking into this corporate work-your-ass-off mentality that isn't really getting me what I want.  I still don't know what that is.  I do my jobs well and I do my best to excel in what I do.  As fun as it is though, I don't know if it's for me.  I don't ever know if anything really is for me, but I sit and I wait and I hope that what I'm doing will eventually lead me somewhere.

I accomplished the task of putting the flooring down in my basement living room.  That's a good surprise.  Now i should be studying and applying for jobs.

Watch this:

The hospital received a bunch of new volunteers in the last month and I've only met 3 of them.  There is one Iranian guy, a russian girl (cute, married, HA), and an Asian girl.  I've met them on separate occassions and they're all very strange.  i guess there is fresh blood in the air and it's always nice.  They seemed to have gravitated toward me as I'm one of the few "old" volunteers who have been kind enough to talk to them.  I know, the job requires that we don't socialize during volunteer times, but when it's slow, what do you do?  I don't get to really socialize at work and this is the only time I get to work with some people and find out about them.

But I hit hard on the first impressions.  You get a good smacking of me and it's hard to let go.  At least, that's what my EGO tells me to believe.  But if I'm not serious in trying to be your friend, that smacking will die and you'll fade away.  i don't have time for a diverse group of friends.  Make that, i don't have the energy for it.  I have lots of time, I'm just lazy.  Too many friends with diverse interests make time difficult.  I'll stick with the ones I have.  They are awesome.

The Iranian guy asked me how I wrote.  I told him that I just blurt everything on a page and then edit like mad.  Like mad.  Is there a better way to put this?  I need some creativity in my life.  It's gone a bit down-hill in the last few months.  I need to relax.  Until I have a definite career, i don't think I can.  So much to do, where do I begin?  I'm not Chinese.  I want an easy life where I get to travel and see new things.  My writing doesn't take me there.  I haven't produced anything good in ages.  Not even a nice one-liner that sums up humanity in a zen-like fashion, representing us as the totality of hypocracy.  yeah, i wish I knew what I said too.  throw some big words in there.  i should.  I studied philosophy.

I need to do a major mind dumb right now to try and focus a bit so I'm going to go off on my mind and write about the most useless things to hopefully persuade my brain to get back into focus.  Right now, the only thing on my mind are my wonderful shoes that I seem to be sporting casually around the office.  They are a pair of Hush Puppies.  I have never bought a pair before but they feel wonderful.  They have this "system" called the Float FX which is a nice chunk of floaty jelly subsubstance on the heel and ball of my feet to keep them nice and squishy.  Their in-soles are also offer amazing cushioning capacities and a slight arch for my flat useless feet.  At first, when I tried them at the store, I thought a size 42 would be too big for me, but after a few hours in them, I think these are the right size for me.  I may still end up buying a pair of light in soles to keep the shoes clean from my stink.  The shoe is called the William.  I am not a William but they are not bad.  I haven't had a new pair of dressy-casual shoes in about 3 years so this is a nice turn around.  I'm glad people are finally realizing that walking in dress shoes can hurt.  Do they ever feel good?

On another note, my room has been painted and this weekend, the floors will go in.  Maybe by the end of June, I'll actually have a decent looking suite to call my own.  Rent is going up all over the place and I see no problem with living in my own private escape until such time as I can afford to move out and own.  Without owning, there is no way to pay for life.

My track of being an amateur photographer has been lacking as well.  I think I need to get this suite done before I move on to more exciting and creative things.  My mind is constantly weak with a lack of any self desire to improve.  I've just been very tired lately.  I need to get my energy up.  How do I do that?  Maybe I need a quick run after work or a skip around the block.  Something to that effect may work to my advantage.

Okay, I think I've dumped my mind sufficiently.  I have to write interesting things if I want people to read.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2008/mar/01/scienceofclimatechange.climatechange

http://money.cnn.com/2008/04/21/news/economy/moms_foodshopping/index.htm

http://www.nysun.com/news/food-rationing-confronts-breadbasket-world

Now these articles are kind of US-centric, but they get the same supplies of food as Canada.  The scientist says sustainable living is not going to happen and we're in for a rough ride in the next couple of years.  Is this fear mongering or is there some truth to this?  What I'm afraid of is that there is a lot of investment again in technology and generating an economy based on "green" living.  We're pretty stuck on doing this, while at the same time, enjoying the use of our blackberries and computers and cars and fancy clothes that are stretching our planet pretty thin.  I don't know if you remember, but in school, we learned about carrying capacity.  Every ecosystem is supposed to have one, but a lot of conservatives think that doesn't exist.  The big house and 3 or 4 cars is still a North American dream and most people are somehow making up for it.  Should our culture be changed to reflect that this is not the answer? 

The environmental movement started in the 60s and those people who started it are at the age where they're the ones running the giant companies and using up resources like mad.  At work, I read about companies looking for "green" ways of doing things, buying chunks of land for gold, copper or coal and generally doing some pretty huge natural resource surveys.  Our we running out of resources now?  Would those resources even matter when climate change is (has the potential to?) destroying our crops because the seasons aren't meshing properly? 

My dad likes to garden and he's frustrated that he's unable to get his crops growing.  Talking to people at the hospital who are farmers, they're concerned about the cold in BC and the grain industry in the Prairies where the cold weather and made for some wet, muddy soil, which makes planting grain impossible.  They have a short season over there so they need all the sun they can get.  Is this a once in a while issue like how it was described in the Good Earth?  (Not the best book about farming, but if you can imagine having years of drought or years of flooding, it can devastate your living).  At what point do we attribute the weather to natural fluctuations or something like climate change caused by our consumer culture. 

We can look to China and India as they are growing rich and are able to support a culture like North America.  Will we see problems there with the amount of consumables they will be using there?  I'm worried about all this need for consumption.  My friends at my age are doing it all the time and we have it so lucky.  We lose some rice here and there, then we lose some vegetables here and there, and what does it matter if you have a 2008 blackberry?

Whatever, the sky is about the go completely dark anyway.  A fat woman decided that her pessimism will rub off the right way on my friend, Greg, who was manning the station at the Chevron down the street on Friday night.  Just give me the gas, she said.  Whatever.  Greg didn't really give a damn about his current obsession with the rolls of juicey fat on this woman's body.

It's friday night man.  Hurry up and finish your shift.  Then we can hang out and really get this weekend started.

I can't, dude.  You know I've got some homework to do and I've have this thing with Cheryl tomorrow morning so I can't go all out.

I'm not asking you to go all out.  It's just a couple of drinks with the guys.  Besides, I need to get out there and start dating again.  Christy almost devastated my faith in relationships.  I need a fling to get her out of my system.

Then go on without me.  I gotta close up shop.  Give me a sec.

Greg was generally a very relaxed gentleman who was always sleepy and never typed very fast.  He insisted on my trivial game of writing nonsense to this page.

I'm going to read about you in 10 years in the papers.  That's my goal.  It should be yours too.  Thanks, Pappy.