Optimism and pessimism

Everywhere I went today it seemed everyone was speaking Spanish. Two customers at the bank were speaking in Spanish. A couple of little girls, at different times, with older adults, were speaking Spanish. A couple of songs came on in different shops that reminded me very distinctly of the first time I went to Mexico and what was going on around that time. Two songs that are very connected to each other for me for other reasons, but if I were to interpret the synchronicity in terms of a calling, they seem to also be affirming: travel, go back to Latin America, you’re on the right path.

My host says he gave up his dream of pure science to enter industry so his five year old daughter would not have to go to a daycare where she was bullied every day. He is much more practically minded than a just follow your dreams kind of guy. I am am hesitant to tell him I just want to play with language and music all the time! I mentioned wanting to travel and he said, that is a sure path to the street. He is not exactly an optimist and he does not expect he has much longer to live, even, and he does not believe in any kind of afterlife. He sees the world kind of going to hell and yet still does these climate demonstrations every week and is committed to action nonetheless.

I can understand I guess where he is coming from, it is so sad that he had to do that and for that reason. There are ways to follow your dreams and not give up on them but so little support in even the best of communities for doing that. Maybe some dreams, like being a scientist, inevitably come with big sacrifices, and maybe there are not a whole lot of options other than academia and industry. Laboratory life could be, but isn’t, anything like I imagined it would be when I was little and I am glad I didn’t become a physicist but being able to do more theoretical exploration would have been fun. But I guess it is really hard to he an armchair scientist and make discoveries from your basement. You could discover gravity that way, I guess, but Newton already did that, with an apple tree. We should be showing people how fun science can be but once you become a scientist you should have the ability to play and pursue your passions, too. But so much is based on funding for grants and what you think is important to research probably isn’t in vogue right now and you can’t study it without the funding but even if you do get funding it can take up all your resources just to keep it. Scientists who think they are going to ne working in the lab end up writing grants for a living instead. You need really expensive and sometimes enormous ewuipment to study subatomic particles and all these things. I wish the world would change, in so many ways, but I kind of feel like I am going to be waiting a really long time.

I don’t know if we, as a planet, are waking up at all to better ways of doing things, more healthy and nurturing and flexible and trauma-informed and playful and genius-cultuvating ways of doing things. But it is not enough to cultuvate individual genius. We need to cultivate genius in communities so they can draw on the collective wisdom of everyone and be more vibrant and resilient. I am sure the places I have been lately, the shelter, and now here, with a not necessarily optimistic but nonetheless committed activist, are affecting my outlook on the world. I am not around people who are optimistic about the future so mone of that is rubbing off on me though I wish it would.

If I ever went into science all these restrictions probably would have depressed me mightily. There is so much red tape and such I wonder what it would take to be a genius scientist who changes the world. Oh, my host said he gave a copy of his book to Neil deGrasse Tyson and this documentary he was just watching seems really similar to one of his ideas. He says if they ever meet again, he will ask him if there is any connection. When you influence things in the world like that, in ways you maybe can’t quite pin down, but younfeel sure in some way you are at least part if the inspiration for something happening in the world or whatever, part of the cause that les to the effect, he has a word for it: influencing the noosphere. (He is publishing a journal soon in a medical journal, co-authoring eith a medical doctor, where his conclusion is that as far as safe foods for lactose intolerance vegan foods are the only ones you can trust. He would have never thought if testing vegan foods for lactose if I wasn’t here.)

By the way my iPhone voice to text is horrible. I wonder if there is a way to change it. Android was so much better. I tried it again when I wanted to type “copy of his book,” and it came out, “happy en Facebook.” iPhone always seems to interpret my words as some strange combination of Spanish and English. I love how these voice to text features actually make guesses and change them: I think you’re saying this, oh no, maybe you’re saying that. Maybe neither of them are right but the fact that it changes its mind is so weird to me and I think lots of fun could be had with that.

Okay. I am onto my fourth set of 5 hiragana characters. I am pretty good with the vowels and ka, ki, ku, ke, ko sounds. Also ga, gi, gu, ge, go which are basically the same as the knsounds with a couple extra marks next to them to indicate the k changes to a hard g. Now I am doing S sounds.