Validate Your Life

…and not watching movies. (This is in reference to non-fiction books, btw — and quality reads, not crap).

1. Movies leave you under a spell; an illusory haze so you cannot see. Books give control of the haze others are under.
2. Movies manufacture illusion without you knowing it, while books allow you to choose experience illusion, without decoupling awareness from experience.
3. Books enable to you to explain and teach about illusions and reality, placing you at “cause” instead of at “effect” where you are a victim of illusion. You’re in the driver’s seat reading and writing books.
4. Books clarify and provide understandings. Movies merely create suspence and foreshadowing. Movies are hollow, they foreshadow and build suspense, but they leave you empty with no treasure, no gem. Books have the gem. Books, sure, create suspense, intrigue, and connection. I remember countless “on the edge of my seat” reads of Sherlock Holmes and bawling at the end of Where the Read Fern Grows in early elementary school. And just in 2008, I was completely engaged and in awe of the adventure created by Jules Verne in around the world in 80 days. Those fiction reads provided massive suspense, BUT BUT BUT, unlike movies, the books also provided incredible value and understanding!! I learned so many lessons from those books above. For example, inductive observational skill from Doyle’s book (Sherlock Holmes), the touching experience of pet comraderie (from Where the Red Fern Grows), and the necessity of time, precision, and the cool collected travel making things happen skills of Mr. Fogg from Around the World in 80 days. Because I READ those experiences as books as opposed to watch what was blasted at me with pixels from a movie, I experienced them more wholistically and I acquired the lesson and understanding, with the entertainment and fun of a very absorbing and exciting read!
5. You think more clearly with a book because your brain gets neurological activity firing that is congruent with the logic of the book. Kind of like a “mental-cerebral” version of “if you smile, you’ll feel happy”. If you read a smart book, you’ll think more intelligently. Movies trick and obfuscate intelligence.
6. Books, you have total control over the pace, and “order you read”, movies (unless you fumble with FF and RW buttons, you do not have the same control.
7. Books, your vision is the movie and you are the director; movies lack that customization.
8. Books teach and entertain and create more cohesive thinking; movies, merely entertain with an inkling of “teaching”.
9. Both movies and books inspire, but books provide an inspiration that is more enduring beacuse it is “your own version” of the inspiration.
10. Finally, books don’t need electrical outlets, high-tech dvd players, surround sound and the like. Books are portable; you can bring them anywhere. Laptops are fixing that with movies, but with a book, you use your “built-in” surround sound, imax, widescreen mental imagery vision, which is infinitely more crisp, alive, and exciting than a movie screen.

I’m a former movie junkie (thousands and reruns) and have rediscovered the joy of reading!

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John Kuczmarski

Beginning Fiction Writing

Beginnings 250 (Perspective w/light)

June 7, 2005

Rekindle the Rapport

The reflection of the office lamp on the window made it nearly impossible for Rebecca to see out into the ghostly summer night.  Not that she was concerned with the arid desert evening; she was fervently pecking away at the conclusion to her “Metaphors of Sexuality in American Society” thesis.  Because there was no way for her to see out as he looked in, the one-way window transparency did, however, benefit her colleague, the spying Samuel Gervin, whom she knew before she moved to the vacant desert of Montana.  His hesitation before entering wasn’t voyeuristic.  Instead, Samuel — nervous about rekindling any relationship, be it business-related or long-time friendship — had paused in awe of the strokes of undulating reminiscence that bombarded his conscience when he saw her assiduously typing away.

Samuel and Rebecca had been friends for almost all of the two-year experience at the small Stone Child College near Box Elder, Montana.  Samuel had always considered their relationship as something more than companionship, but was complacent with their rapport, which was generated by doing field research for their ecological final, studying for finals, and attending most classes together.  The waves of college memories — from getting lost in the Appalachians during their research project, to surviving the car crash on I-191 near Harlowton, to Rebecca’s graceful smile of gratitude whenever he reminded her to take her insulin – almost made him dizzy with glee to see her.  Taking a deep breath, he balanced one crutch against his hefty body, opened the screen door, inched his broken leg inside the doorframe, and was about to rap upon the window-pane of the door, but paused.  An uncertain, icy panic besieged him; “maybe I shouldn’t visit her,” he thought at the last minute.  “Maybe she doesn’t even want to see me in the middle of her work”.  Too late — the squeak of the screen door had alerted Rebecca, who twisted in her chair, squinting out into the dim night to determine the source of the disturbance.  In an embarrassed fluster, Samuel simultaneously realized his impending obligation to, now, knock and enter and his desire to bolt away from the porch and abandon the visit entirely.  He awkwardly wheeled around his body, wrenching his leg forward, and rapped twice on the door, only to snag his crutch on the screen door, tripped, and fell into a pathetic heap on the porch just as Rebecca opened the door.

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In “Maslow on Management”, Maslow talks about the necessity and importance of self-actualization, but realizes that frequently, “flakes and gurus” as he calls them, learn of a new trend and bank on that to earn capital. True, true, but we must also respect the passion of such “flakes and gurus”. After all, while they may try to swindle money, they do connect with honest, healthy visions that people have to have a pre-existing, intrinsic interest towards in the first place. So they can exploit, but they exploit, in a way, something good and worthwhile and if it weren’t for the money charge, it wouldn’t be exploitation, but identification with intrinsic values!

Take vocabulary for example, Maslow wrote, “if one increased his vocabulary, he would also dramatically increase his learning by 10 to 100 percent” (Maslow 119). That’s ginormous! He also pointed out that the increased vocabulary leads to an increased awareness of the world, and, in contrast, a lower vocabulary, sincerely increases paranoid behavior. Lowered vocabularies lower your awareness making you effectively somewhat “blind”! Now those socalled “New Age flakes and gurus” could surely bank a buck on this and have overly-expensive “vocabulary learning classes” . One could argue that such an exploitation inhibits a person’s growth and steals their money, but the end result is the positive heightened awareness. Conclusively, it feels like the New Age exploiters utilize a manipulative process, but with a correspondingly energizing end result.

In the conclusive denouement of the correspondence between Andrew Kay, Maslow, and the editor of the book, the reached a correlation on the nature of “gypping” ideas. Maslow described that he would, for period, feel enraged at people stealing his ideas for papers or other various constructs, but now just finds it humorous and funny. He writes, “copying or stealing is a little like stealing the egg, instead of the hen that lays the eggs. In a word, money must be used; the mind must be used; creativeness must be used and one must spend it and be prodigal with it rather than to hoard it and be stingy with it and think that it can be used up or spent in decreased in quantity…The very process of talking about ideas helps the creativeness, and thereby makes it more likely taht there will be hundreds of ideas where there were only dozens before” (Maslow 120). In other words, unless you tackle it on your own, with your own process, your own voice, and apply your own creativeness, the outcome will have limitations. However, if you do apply your own creativity, the result becomes infinite.

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Everyone Loves some Good Ol’ Factoids!!!

Toothbrushes
Originaly made in China by drilling holes in Ivory and inserting horse hair!
They can be made by hand with fine copper wire and looping that around pig’s bristles, forming a tuft.

Celcius to Farenheit Conversion Generalizations
Celcius TO Farenheit
-20-40C = -4-104 F (60 degrees of Celcius equals roughly 100 degrees of Farenheit)
-20—10 = (0-15) (-4-14)
-10-0 = (15-30)-(14-32)
0-10 =30-50 (32-50)
10-20=50-70 (50-68)
20-30=70-90 (68-86)
30-40=90-100 (86-104)

I liked the days before all the massive spam bulk forwarding email freak fests…When an email was as rare as a letter from a friend or a postcard from a traveler…sigh.

In any case, I realized I’m very much like a kid. When I was a lot younger I never really dreamt of being a Superman or a super hero or a fireman or things that kids typically dream of an envision themselves as. So I realized in my young adulthood I’ve still acted as a dreamer but dreaming and pretending to be as epic as Paul Newman or as talented as Collin Farrel, Brad Pitt, or Tom Cruise or Gabriel Byrne or maybe as wise as Emerson or as clever as Einstein or as peaceful as the Dalai Lama. More recently have dreamt “play-pretending” of being as talented as the actors or comedians as witty as Jim Carrey or as fearless Robin Williams. But it’s still the same as dreaming of being a superhero at age 4.

Being a constant lifelong learner, I always have to have something to study and with which to connect my mind. As of late (the past few months and years), I’ve been studying Neurolinguistic Programming (useful for communications, for general conversations with people, to giving performances such as comedy on stage, NLP is essential), some Jungian Psychology (for creativity and peace in aiming to understand the complex areas of life), rudimentary math (for clarity), as well as audition and standup comedy books to keep me aligned and focused on career.

“All that time, under the gorgeousness was this major actor waiting to get out….He was getting on, and, an actor has a choice about how much of himself he’s going to reveal” (p.28).
This one made a LOT of sense. Because after all…some times actors play roles, characters VASTLY different from their core personality (take Michael Richards for example, a very philosophical personality in person, but plays a quite a contrary character). In many ways I feel I do that as well. It’s difficult to distinguish what parts of me are character versus just “me” at times. Even when trying to recreationally entertain I approach it with a seriousness, so it can even be difficult for me to make a distinguishing characteristic!

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I’m not some geezer reminiscing on “Sonatra days” but I do have a repertoire of “Old School” music videos by which I felt utterly entranced by in the early 90s. In addition to watching a music video being something “somewhat rebellious”, going back and revisiting them and understanding the underlying message of a lot of them has felt extremely rewarding.

Some of these I claim “utterly awesome” because of their visual story, or maybe I owned the album and liked seeing the band, or maybe I just liked the tune, but they all embody and quintessentially capture the 90s music scene. In any case, Here’s my top ten list not in any specific order:

1. Men without Hats. The Safety Dance
   This is such a goofy (but appropriate) music video for this song. I had never heard of the band, nor the song, but this I definitely caught multiple times channel surfing in my teens as one of the weirdest (but still acceptable) videos of all time.

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Well, iPhone continues it’s assault in knocking off numerous other electronic devices. Along with GPS devices, household-wide remotes, now it’s the killer device for the Amazon Kindle Kindle.

It’s also going to slaughter the less popular Sony Reader

eReader.com released an elegant and intuitive eReader app on the app store. The app itself and the ereader.com account that let’s you download full books are both free. Sure you pay for modern books, but I just downloaded Jules Verne’s “Around the World in 80 Days” for free (most all classics are free) and can view it with the beautiful flip technology on the iPhone. If you can find a book on project Gutengerg, it will most likely be on eReader.com from which you can view it on your iPhone with eReader’s cool “page-flipping” software.

Here’s some photos I took utilizing iPhone 2.0′s image-capture technology.

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3:51 AM
June 29, 2008
I just recieved an RCA cable (a special tv part I needed) that sold for $6.47 on ebay (including shipping) and it was shipped from Hong Kong!

Why is that cool? Well, for one it’s a hella long way to ship something so cheaply. Reflecting upon ancient roman roads which spanned an awe-inspiring 53,819 miles in 450 bc with the laws of Twelve Tables regulating road length and message telegrams, this is amazing. I remember tracking my sweet iPhone as it was shipped from Hong Kong (where it’s manufactured) to Alaska and finally to California. Then I got another package from a neighbor on Van Nuys, roughly 20 miles away from me! The Hong Kong package traveled roughly 7,254 miles. The other package traveled about 20 miles. Both were less than $5 shipping fees. I mention this because 1)shipping is truly astonishing and 2)it has current relevance in literature.

The Hong Kong package even had a customs certificate!

Additionally, I’m in the midst of reading Jules Verne’s epic “Around the World in 80 Days, and around Chapter 20 Fogg, Auoda (the Indian babe Fogg heroically rescued) and Passepartout, the wiry little frenchman arrive in the very same city of Hong Kong after voyaging from Calcutta, India on the “Rangoon”, only to discover that they’ve missed the “Carnatic” ship and hire a small-time boater to make it to Yokohama in time. So this has some of that “world as a story” flavor to it. Reading about Hong Kong in a fictional classic and then coincidentally receiving a package from the same city (and the fact that cost less than $5 shipping) and the book is free just kind of sets the stage for a nice, little literary-relevance-making-the-world-smaller-but-more-magical ambiance to this serendipity. Just the fact the part was so cheap and the distance it traveled was so great has congruence with Phillias Fogg’s character, and Verne’s book is free on project Gutenberg, it’s just kind of some everyday magic that arises for very cheap, without massive expenses, or with zero expenses.

Call me “easy to please” but these little serendipitous gems of reading a classic novel that travels the world and then receiving a package that has nearly traveled the same route as the characters in that novel?!! Well, that’s just cool bizarro country 2000.

I Never Knew the Difference Between all these so here’s the skinny on the spirits of the world.

Wine and beer are fermented, but All Hard Alcohol == Liquor == Spirits is DISTILLED, not fermented. Therefore, all the hard alcohol listed below are made through a distillation process. What is being distilled (potatoes, grains, corn, sugarcane, or plants) is what determines the hard alcohol.

Vodka comes from potatoes, grains, or sugar beets.

Whiskey is distilled from grain mash and aged in wooden casks (Irish and Scottish).

Brandy is like the distilled form of wine (but it has hard alcohol content of 40-60%). It comes from grapes, pomace, or fermented fruit.

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I’ve had an ongoing list of various research trivia projects from Eucalyptus leaves to Cinco De Mayo.

I finally got around to research them, but some of the excerpts are almost too small for their own article, so I pooled the trivia research findings all here.

Here’s the results.

Eucalyptus

Cinco De Mayo
“5th of May” || US version of “Yorkton Day” “October 17, 1781″ ||. Surprisingly this doesn’t celebrate Mexican Independence, So what famous event does the 5th of May recognize? Well, Mexican Indepndence was close, except it wasn’t the Declaration independence day, which was September 15, 1810. Instead, May 5, 1862 marks the key military conquest where Mexico smashed the French army and traitor mexican soldiers at Puebla, 100 miles east of Mexico City! I made, if I do say so myself, I VERY clever analogy with the American independence. In 1781, Cornwallis officially surrended in Yorktown to George Washington. Our official declaration of independence occurred back in 1776 and the key military battle that clinched our independence, not unlike May 5, 1862 for Mexico, was October 17, 1781. Conclusively, Cinco de May is not Mexican Independence day, but rather the day Mexico “clinched” its independence, like a “17th of October Yorktown” day for the U.S.!

Neptune

• Neptune is 17x earth
• Windiest planet in solar system
• Named after roman god of the sea, his brother’s are Jupiter and Pluto.
• Methane makes it blue.
• And it’s moon is Triton (1 of 13 moons).
• Undergoes apparent retrograde every 367 days

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Water molecules are attracted to each other by means of the very subtle, but certainly existest, Van der Waals force. In a normal body of water, water molecules are equally pulling on each other, except at the surface of the water. There, the water molecules pull together creating a dome shape. This “surface tension” is what causes water bead and to almost encapsulate itself. This surface tension is great if you are an insect floating on water (the surface of water is actually more resilient because of this tension) or if you are drying off anything (the water will collect into beads). This surface tension is a problem if you really want something to get wet — clothing, stains, things that need cleaning — because the water will attract more to itself than to other people. This is where soap comes in.

Soap works because its a surface-acting agent, or surfactant. Surfactants break up the surface tension on water. With the surface tension broken up, water will “melt” into any substance and becomes more “porous”, if you will, to things it contacts. Surfactants work because they have molecules with hydrophillic (attracted to H20 molecules) and hydrophobic (repelled by water) ends. The hydrophillic end binds to the water while the other hydrophobic or lipophillic (attracted to lipids, namely the debris of stains or dirt). Therefore, the surfactants kind of become miniature links between H20 and debris, thus allowing water to bring the dirt with it as it is washed away.