what?

It’s only After Dark January 23, 2009

After quite a hiatus (but after all, it was vacation), here are some reflections (warning: glumness may follow):

• I have become slightly more aware of the importance of organization for social prosperity. It is really of utmost importance. It’s what seemed to me to be #1 reason why Nicaragua is 3rd world.
• I have been touched by what I saw on TV, watching President Obama’s inauguration. It is impressive how such sentiment can be connected to a leader. I believe they call it hope, but they gotta pry that from my cold, dead lips. 😉 [read a blogpost]
• Living in US suburbia brings to mind the expansiveness of the US-American middle class as a mass of people. People used to such grand life-styles!

On Laziness There is not very much room for laziness in the industrial nations I know. Even the easygoing US. Easygoing here sometimes seems to translate into extra work to be extra nice. (Not that I wouldn’t try to be nice!)
I’m quite lazy — that’s what was so neat about the time I spent in Costa Rica and Nicaragua: I was in a really tight financial situation. But being lazy was a sensible choice there. It saved energy, so I needed to eat & drink less — and I really enjoyed the tropical weather and living outside. Is it sensible here too?
All those nice appliances, gadgets and amenities of industrial life! For example these Computers. All built on this baffling machinery of modern society. It blows my mind again and again, that all these ghosts are alive and moving in such admirable concert. All this system of interdependency sometimes eats on my mind! If something were to go wrong — and I suspect it will, the fear I have is that folks will hurt. (In another only slightly related news, I have been thinking of how the Israeli people are running into pain, I fear — in the long-, the geo-strategic & demographic run.)

Oh, how glum all this is, I do apologize! Very! I am still quite concerned that this or that might collapse at some point, but maybe it’ll take a bit longer than feared, and come more gradually, so we’ll hopefully have plenty of room to wriggle our way through the crisis while having a gratifying life.

But for the proponents of the “people will come up with something, people have always come up with something” thesis: I totally agree. But it’s not at all guaranteed that what they will come up with will resemble our current lifestyle, even in some of its most fundamental amenities. On the other hand, I do not suggest a doomsday scenario, well I kinda suggest it, but I do not expect it. Our lives and our expectations will change, which is just absolutely normal. The difference is simply that I often times live in expectation of social change. You know, it’s change we can believe in… dollars… yeah right.

On a more personal note I notice getting a bit older again. I accustoming myself to my mid-twenties and am nursing some chronic bodily weakness, most vividly present in my everyday life for half a decade now. My hope is very much to get myself on a track of recovery from pain by setting myself up in a more regular life-style now. Please bear with me in your thoughts, that I may.

My aunt has an ant-invasion going on in her house, and she’ll be calling the terminator. At the family I stayed with in Nicaragua this was a non-issue; they had a dirt floor. Ants simply were present.