Life, the Universe, Everything

 It occurs to me that there are still millions of people, if not billions, who don't think that space and science are cool.

This is very unsettling.

I've been keeping up with Curiosity, and the new deep space telescope that will be replacing Hubble, and every day I'm amazed by the nature of the universe - every day some new breakthrough or innovation happens somewhere in the world. 

Any minute now, some genius somewhere could come up with a plausible way to send humans into space. Any minute now, some earth-shattering breakthrough could be made that changes our lives forever, and yet there are still millions of people who think that THE WORLD IS ONLY 2012 YEARS OLD.

How can we as a species abide such a disparity? Why are we not falling all over ourselves to spread knowledge and ideas?

This question is mostly rhetorical... I have my thoughts on the matter and other people have theirs - but the sentiment remains. The fact that there are so many poorly educated people in the United States is sad and appalling - it doesn't really matter why, because there is no excuse.  Not while there are public libraries and wi-fi on cellphones. Even the homeless and peniless can be educated. Information is EVERYWHERE, yet people still allow themselves to be told what to think and how to feel. There are millions of people out there who could be studying medicine or quantum physics instead of watching Jersey Shore (which I think at this point everyone can agree is a waste of time). So, why aren't they?

I think when you can answer that question, you'll know why we haven't ended world hunger or brought about world peace yet.

Whatever answer we find, I don't think any effort will be successful unless it starts with - and focuses on - the education of young children.   Study after study after study has proven beyond reasonable doubt that the foundation for our personalities is impressed on us by the time we are 5 years old - and so many people just let their children run around totally knowledge-less until they go to school, thinking it's the teacher's job to teach their children everything, and it puts everyone involved at a disadvantage.

I think a community should revolve around the education of it's children and a sustainable food supply, with everyone helping everyone else on a local scale. I think if every neighborhood pitched in and pooled resources into a public library, gave it computers and volunteer teachers and mentors, and let any kid who wanders by participate in interest-driven "classes", the majority of problems that plague American culture today would disappear entirely in a decade.

I Need to Write Children's Books

This is a toddler.  Also known as "the future".

The cultural and societal problems that America is facing today would probably never have happened if not for the fact that somewhere along the line, people stopped teaching their kids the value of hard work and earning what you have; this combined with the continuing epidemic of hatred and distrust for our fellow human beings for superficial reasons (skin color, gender, sexual preferences) has created nearly every problem we face today as a country.

Not enough people are teaching their children to be sensible, forward-thinking human beings.

I'm going to be making some generalizations here, but understand that I am fully aware that these blanket statements don't cover everyone.  If you're an exception to the rule, congratulations, I'm not talking about you.


1 : Wealthy Kids

Children born into wealthy families aren't being taught the value of earning what you have, because everything just gets handed to them. They grow up with a sense of entitlement; they never had to work for anything, so actually having to put in real effort is seen as some horrible thing. They act like money grows on trees, because there's always more of it to be had and all they have to do is hold out their hands. They can have the best of everything and never have to lift a finger to get it.
This is a dangerous mindset to grow up with, because these kids will someday be in a position to control the salaries and working conditions of the majority of the working class. They will have absolutely no understanding of how life is for those who aren't fabulously wealthy, other than what they hear in horror stories about poor people who want handouts. They will see everyone who isn't as rich as they are as leeches, and they will have no respect for the people who do the work that keeps their money flowing in. These kids will have no concept of where all their money actually comes from, or how that money is supposed to work in order to create truly prosperous country - they won't know the meaning of the American Dream.

2 : Poor Kids

Children born into poverty aren't being taught the value of earning a living, because they grow up in an environment where either their parents or their friends' parents are trying to live off of a system that's all too eager to give handouts to people who aren't willing to better their situation.  They're taught - either directly by being told, or indirectly by examples set by their role models - that there's no point in working because there will always be a handout to bail them out, and they grow up with a sense of entitlement to that lifestyle.
This, too, is a dangerous mindset to grow up with. They grow up with a minimal-effort, minimal-gain attitude, content to simply survive instead of putting in the work to rise above their situation. They have more than likely been mostly ignored by their parents (who probably didn't want kids to begin with, or who didn't realize how much having a kid changes your life) and so have had to learn about the world through experience - and anyone who has lived in a poor neighborhood can tell you that it's not the best example that can be set for a growing, impressionable mind.

Neither of these two categories of children will truly understand the value of self-discipline, self-improvement, or looking at The Big Picture; but for vastly different reasons.  Both categories of children have learned to take advantage of those around them, but in vastly different ways.

And this has been going on for generations.  Obviously, it's not working out for humanity as a whole - all you have to do is look around and see the problems this sort of conditioning has caused.


What does all of this boil down to?  Education.  If there is one thing that all human beings should have an inalienable right to in this era of humanity's evolution, it's the right to a proper education.
I'm not talking about a college education, or education in academics.
I'm talking about education about how to be a human being, and not an ignorant, narcissistic, entitled, inconsiderate asshole.


Lets think long-term for a minute.  Where do we want humanity to be a hundred years from now?
If you're like most people, your immediate thought was "why should I care? I'm not going to be alive in a hundred years, so it doesn't matter to me where humanity is by then."

That's exactly the train of thought that has brought about the chaos we see in our culture today.  Nobody gives a rat's ass about the future, only the present.

Only themselves.

I shouldn't have to explain why this is such a horrible thing, but once again, look around you.  Consider your friends, your relatives, your co-workers.  I'd stake my life on the bet that you probably know someone whose life is screwed up beyond repair because of their own shortsighted decisions.  You've no doubt experienced shitty customer service and tech support, because the waitress or representative hates their job and doesn't care about you. Or you've had something you bought break shortly after buying it because the people who made it cut corners on materials and would rather force you to buy another one than spend a little more to give you a quality product.

In fact, the vast majority of the less-than-satisfactory things that exist in the world were created by short-sighted people who don't care about how their actions (or inaction) affect the future. People that thought to themselves, "It doesn't affect me, so what?"


This is why we need to start teaching our children to consider the consequences of their actions. To be responsible, hold themselves accountable, learn from not only their own mistakes but from those of people around them. To be curious and question what they think they know instead of blindly following the herd.  To be compassionate and generous. How to tell when they are being taken advantage of and to not take advantage of others. And most importantly, how to look past superficial differences like color, gender, sexual preferences... oh yeah, and choice of religion... and see what *really* matters in a a person: the willingness to contribute meaningfully to one's community and the world around them.

Because to do anything less only perpetuates the downward spiral our society is rapidly descending.

Watercolor Pencils, GO!

Got some new toys today :D
A really awesome client of mine paid for some artwork with these, and I'm ecstatic! I haven't had non-digital materials like this at my disposal since college.  In 2001.

The brushes aren't here yet, so it'll be a day or so before I can seriously use them, but for the moment I'm testing how they look with wet q-tips.  Not good enough for any serious art, but certainly good enough for color blot-tests.

I've decided the dining room table will be my art table; there's really good light out there in the daytime since the table's right up against the windows, and even at night the ceiling light is better than the livingroom lights.

Nia's still too short to reach the top of the aforementioned table, so she can't get into them when I'm not looking- yet.  Hopefully by the time she figures out how to climb up on top of the chair, I'll have taught her not to touch mommy's expensive things... or acquired the forethought to put either them or her away before leaving either unattended ...

Stuff Keeps Happening

Joel got promoted this week!
Gotta admit, I'm a sucker for a man in a suit.

More reliable hours and slightly better pay; though his schedule is now 12 hours off from what his previous schedule was.  Instead of waking up at 2pm to be to work at 4pm, he's waking up at 3am to be to work at 5am.  Adjusting our sleeping to fit this schedule has been interesting, to say the least, especially with a toddler in the mix.
Yesterday was the first day on this new schedule, but so far it's playing out like this:

I go to bed shortly after he leaves for work, since Nia's usually asleep by then.
She'll wake me up two or three times for feedings (she's still partially breastfed) before being up for the day, which is usually around the time Joel's getting home.  He and I have a few hours together before he goes to bed around 7:30pm, during which time he shoots things in Counterstrike and APB, then we have dinner and watch an episode of one of our shows - yesterday it was Lie to Me.
Once he goes to bed, I juggle doing artwork and occupying the tiny hooman, though lately it's been more of the latter than the former - she's become extremely demanding, and I'm REALLY looking forward to getting a car next week so I can enroll her in daycare; I would have before now, except that without a car there's no way to get her to and from.

In a few days, Joel's leaving for MA to get his license suspension taken care of.  I think it's so stupid that he has to physically appear in court; permission to Skype, your honor?  Honestly, the fine he'll have to pay is probably less than half what the plane tickets to get there cost. Really could have used that $500 towards getting a nicer car; so instead of $1500 we'd have $2k to work with.  But no. The court has to act like we're still in the 19th century or something.

*deep breath*

Anyway.  Daycare.  Ugh.

On one hand, Nia really needs to be socialized; she needs the company of other kids, and other caretakers. She's at that age where it's really important.  On the other hand... people are, more often than not in my experience, garbage.  Especially other people's children.  I've probably bitched about the kids around here in this blog once already; I read the news, I read things on the internet too, and a lot of the things I see or hear about really sincerely worry me about the quality of the culture my daughter is going to grow up being exposed to.

There's only so much parents can do to prepare their children for this brutal world, especially if everyone around them are the moral equivalents of Rush Limbaugh or Madonna.

How do you explain to your child that no matter what kind of person she is, someone out there will always hate her?  How do you explain that for every good person in the world, there's a malicious one?  I suppose all parents, on some level, want to insulate their children from reality, want them to learn from their mistakes before they go and make their own.

But of course it's an impossible dream.

Unless you're Amish or something.

Over a month ago...

I started this blog, hoping I could update it daily. Six days in, I was already behind.
Now it's been a month since my last update, and if history is any indicator, it's going to be rocky getting back into it.

I think the reason for this is due to two things:

1.) I usually have very little to say. I haven't come to the point where I feel that my daily life is interesting enough to chronicle the minutes of, and often when there is, it's not something I want to write down or tell the general public.
2.) I have opinions that are pretty controversial, and when I get fired up about something, like religion or republicans or PWDs, I try to bite my tongue because I don't like offending people.

There probably isn't any easy fix to problem 1. That's going to take time. There are days when I have a lot to say and want to get it all out at once, but I avoid doing that because I'd spend all day writing a single post, and that's not really conducive to getting anything else done - after all, I'm an artist, not an author :P  Usually the days when I'm flooded with things to get off my chest, are followed by weeks where I don't want to say anything at all.
Problem 2, on the other hand, does have an easy fix, which is to just come right out and say what's on my mind. That's not an easy thing either, because I'm one of those people who actually cares about what other people think of me.  It's a bad habit, I know, and it's only helped to alienate me from people who might otherwise be friends, but reaching that point of not caring anymore is probably one of the toughest things for an introvert to get past.

Gil Grissom from CSI probably would know exactly how I feel were he a real person - the fear of "being known". The truth of it is, there are a lot of things about me and my life and my choices that I am ashamed of, and that makes it really hard for me to talk about a lot of things.  I tried going to therapy for a while, and I couldn't follow through because after rehearsing things I wanted to say or talk about, it all just sounded so petty and stupid to be worked up about. And here I am, stuffed back into my shell.

So unless I can think of something impersonal to blog about, it's probably going to be very tough going.

Day Six & Seven

Well, it would seem that I skipped a day, though I didn't mean to. I had an entry all written up, and I made the mistake of going to bed without posting it, and apparently Windows did an automatic update overnight. Yay!

So it's been an interesting couple of days. Google+ is getting pretty interesting, the more people/groups I add to my circles. There's a political one that I'm a member of (well, as much as one can be a member of a G+ circle) that sort of floods my feed with articles and things about the antics of various republicans. Thanks to G+, I've learned a lot more about politics in the last month than I ever have in my life. And it's so very disappointing. Pretty much every politician out there has totally forgotten what separation of church and state means, almost all of them base their campaigns on one religious viewpoint or another. While they're busy bitching about this imaginary war on god, they're waging war on education, health, and personal freedom.

Sigh.

Been thinking about what I want to do with this blog; I've mostly been using it as a journal, which is fine, but I think eventually I'll want to start going more seriously into self-improvement/life-hacking stuff.

I left behind a lot of Bad Shit™ in Massachusetts. It kind of irritates me that I'm still carrying a lot of that baggage with me after a year. I try not to "shrink to fit" anymore, but sometimes I still catch myself doing it. Need to internalize the fact that being different does not mean being inferior. That it's okay to be who I am and not stress about what other people think of me, because you can't please everyone. My logical brain knows these things, it's getting my emotional brain to agree and STFU that's the hard part.

Making forward strides, though. Starting to reach out to people - friends I haven't spoken to in years, strangers that I look up to or like how they think. Actually commenting on articles and blog posts and places where others might *gasp!* see what I have to say. So far it's been pretty good for me, even made a couple friends through disagreements with them. Isn't it great when you start off arguing with someone and then end by finding that they're really interesting?

So on today's To Do list is, finishing a couple more commissioned paintings, starting another, listing a couple more prints on my Etsy store, and cleaning house.

Sounds like fun to me :P

Day Five : Damage Control

If I ever get time to work on original stuff again, this is first on the list.

House is trashed.

After Joel's four-day weekend, I'm a ready to have the house to myself again. Problem is, I'm having a lot of trouble finding the energy to do all the crap that needs done. Yesterday was a bummer that ended up getting better towards the end, made some great beef & vegetable soup and watched Nia play peekaboo around the couch with daddy.

Now I'm in damage control mode.

Yesterday's dishes are all over the kitchen.
Laundry is strewn across the bedroom floor in need of sorting.
There are cheerios and raisins scattered around the livingroom and under my desk chair.
Crayon drawings all over the kitchen and livingroom cabinets/drawers (luckily they're all washable)
And don't even get me started on the state of the refrigerator.

On top of all this, my body is once again reminding me that I am, in fact, female.

Damnit.

What I need now is some Doctor Steel and a Housewench Utility Belt.

Wish me luck!