I was sitting on the couch before I arrived at my current caffeinated state and wondering why do we celebrate the New Year. I watched a slurred, sad Dick Clark count down the numbers and watched an overhyped and frigid New York celebration. Soon the "exciting" bit was over and I felt a little underwhelmed. Somewhere between the living room and my bedroom, fireworks started shooting and I thought about all those people celebrating.
And for what, I thought?
Then I came up with it. We're celebrating this because it's something that represents what goodness there is in human nature. The fact that we do get chances to try again, opportunities to regenerate and we become part of the idea that no matter what's happened and how often we've screwed things up, a New Year will always come, unchanging and unbiased towards our behavior.
So now I'm in my caffeine induced state and it really makes a lot of sense to me. We're celebrating not the coming of a new year as a physical change of calendar or even as a marker for the end of an old calendar. We're celebrating that we can still keep flipping that calendar and that with it comes a whole new calendar's worth of opportunity.
Just when you're about to get overwhelmed by consumerism and popular culture, it's important to remember that we can still all celebrate the idea of a whole year of new opportunity and the ceaselessness of that coming of that opportunity.
And that's a great feeling. So let's celebrate that!
]]>Probably a little less than an inch. It snowed long and hard, but it was so cold it was a fine powder and packed down pretty tightly.
I'm juts gonna come out right now and say that I despise cold weather. I absolutely adore Coca-Cola though so the two seem to balance out. I may have packed just a little snow around the can and cup for dramatic effect ;).
It's been quite a long time since I've been driven to write a blog. And a longer time before that since I've had the urge to actually write more than one without forgetting entirely about the idea, instead moving it into the back of my mind to resurface in roughly the same amount of time it takes for a baby to mature in the human womb (read: nine months). Still, I've written a few short essays in this little blue notebook I've been carrying around and I think it's probably time to type some out. Not like I've got much else to do anyway.
This one is the first part of who knows how many parts of a series of miniature essays (this one's probably 200 words, I've got another 400 word one) about Social Capital in America and the way it's developing. Here goes.
About two years ago I would have sworn I hated Myspace. In fact, I still do. It puts the emphasis on top friend selection and ranking instead of on the free flow of communication in a semi-organized fashion. It's frustrating to no end the length people will go to just to decide which one of their friends is their favorite. Still though, the idea that is Myspace is a going to be good for Americans. Maybe not Myspace itself, but if Generation Y is to amount to anything at all, it will almost certainly occur through an Internet based social networking service rather than in person. (Which I think is really sad, but I digress)
Because our lives are so fast and that we've spread that fast lifestyle to the rest of the world, we have killed the traditional style of social rlations. Myspace is a necessity to provide a replacement for services the generations before my own killed off with their insistence on speed, optimimation and beurocracy. As someone from the latter half of Generation Y, I feel like I got shafted in the area of Social Capital. The older generations (particularly Gen. X) have made it very difficult to escape from the hustle and bustle of the quick and speedy type of life they designed.
That in itself is not such a bad thing. The bad thing is that in doing so we have made ourselves dumber because we've killed our social capitol. Social capitol is, as defined by somewhere on the Internet as roughly "The individual and communal time and energy that is available for such things as community improvement, social networking, civic engagement, etc." And so, social capital is the basis on which communities are built. The problem with destorying it is that you destroy not just the community but the very way in which people are socialized, interact with others and fucntion in society. So basically what's happened is that in creating a society that makes doing work easier, they've destroyed the mechanism for creating workers. My genereation is effectively deaf, dumb and blind without without the mechanisms of social capital that every other generation before my own was entitled to.
Dinner parties, Family get togethers, participation in government, sitting down to eat (even if it's just at McDonalds!), going to a football game and even sleepovers are reduced or eliminated.
The only answer short of "Going Amish" is to adapt the mechanics on which social capital works. And we can only do that through something like Myspace. Because the time has been destoryed by modern speed of life, we must adapt to that and still maintain our ability to reach others and make connections. That's where Myspace comes in. It allows us to make connections to people that, due to the problems of modern life, just aren't physically possible to make any more! Myspace isn't the invention of Tom (its reported creator) but rather of the necessity to stay in contact. For our sanity, our intelligence, our education and our socialization.
Whether I hate it or not.
Sorry about writing here again :). The persistent allure of content creation got in the way of the realization that writing a blog may be a futile effort. However, it's almost summer and I want to start keeping some sort semiannually (lol) updated online journal. That puts your here, once again on the Kuyu Blog.
It's been a while, eh? You'd be appalled at the number of things that I've done since I last posted an entry here. I've written about eight songs, taken tens of thousands of pictures, developed as a photographer and writer, learned to play the piano, drawn plans for houses (it's something to do in Chemistry), told hundreds of jokes, and kept an excellent relationship with Stephanie which is now approaching 1.25 years. I've also designed dozens of websites that I never did anything with (face it, they never got out of Photoshop) and written things that I never turned in to anyone. Which just seems like a waste to me, the guy that always likes to not only show off but to show out. Introversion in the field of creativity... is it even worth writing down? I never understood that one.
I suppose you'll want to know all about the travels that I've taken as well, eh? Well, I'd like to try and impress upon you, you wonderful handful of readers, the magnitude of my journeys through Photography. And maybe a few words, just for effect.
The following shots are all from the trip I took in band to Mexico and Belize by way of Royal Carribean ship Navigator of the Seas. Also, we stopped at Disney World on the way down.
I've done a lot of different things. I think my favorite is taking pictures. I'm not really sure when I started taking pictures, but I know I've always been fairly interested. It just seemed like a perfect blend between technology (something I'm good at by nature) and art (I'm not particularly good with pencils, pens, paintbrushes, crayons, but I can do fingerpaints) I always liked looking at pictures. I thought making them might be fun.
Other than the marching and the playing marching band isn't really that bad.
Vox, you have finally made me feel cool. If you haven't seen it, the picture I took at the beach of the lightning (http://flickr.com/photos/kuyman/855396117/) was featured on the Vox homepage today in the "This is Good' section. Whoever submitted my picture, I love you and you have totally made my summer. Thanks to anyone who bothered to look, it means a lot to me.
Ideas hit me in the strangest spots. It's not the shower for me like it is for other people. It's places like someone else's kitchen or in the pool swimming laps or in the middle of a family reunion, surrounded by yellow jacket swarms. Today an idea hit me while I was swimming laps in the pool. I was probably on lap 20 or so when I go the idea, and around 100 when I was forced to come inside against my will. The idea started off simple but got more and more complicated the more absent minded laps I swam.