It’s almost impossible to avoid sounding pretentious when you’re telling your own success story, and I really am sorry for the way my writing sounds. Some of you may even chide me for such a relaxed definition of success. Say what you will, but for the past year, I’ve heard countless mom-and-pop recounts about this website given to older cousins, reunited classmates, and complete strangers (strangers to me, at least). Parent’s eat that stuff up. They love hearing how little kids find ways to make a bit of income, or how they are so lucky to have economically-applicable talent so long before most teenagers start thinking about their careers. All this, and the reverie of extraordinary overnight success, is quite pleasant to hear, but fundamentally ignores reality by reassigning to luck, credit rightfully due to hard work, befittingly so, as their stories are crafted to inspire, not teach. I felt like it was past time that I come up with my own explanation for the first million before grumbling about the shortcomings of those already spread around.

Write what you know, they say. Here are the few things I know: In 2012, you know, the year that just finished, RogerHub got more than 1.4 million page views, 89% of which were directed toward a single page. About halfway through the year, website costs grew to be more than I could handle, so I started putting Ads on the one page that received nearly all of the site’s traffic. This move has generated over a thousand dollars of revenue so far, and has kept the site running. The page mentioned is my “Final Grade Calculator”, something I made two years ago in 2010, and it’s popularity is largely caused by it’s high rank in Google search results¹.

There are two categories of reactions I typically get from people who hear about my calculator for the first time. They are terribly predictable, because the two are essentially the same. The first lies somewhere between a four-function calculator and a rudimentary understanding of mathematics, and the second proposes that the page’s programming is so simple that there’s no way it could compete with any number of identical pages across the Internet. Despite the ostensible assertions that the site has no purpose nor any unique value, my trifling project which I had not a thought about for the half year after I published it has no problem earning visitors. I’ve spent some of my time since this past May puzzling out what led to this stroke of luck, and I’ve since then figured a thing or two out.

Before you become permanently convinced that I’m an egotistical fart for writing about nothing other than myself, I want to say that most of the things above just happened to me, and my choice is and has always been either to keep running or to shutdown, and I don’t claim to have employed any phenomenal skill in the choice-making². However, getting to the top and staying there means more than simply writing a pretty web app. What if Costco installed a system that could record every product you ever looked at in their warehouses? Already, the sales and mail advertising data by themselves would be hugely revealing about human behavior. When you deal with large numbers of people, you get the rare opportunity to see behavioral patterns simply because nobody in the past has ever dealt with the exact same demographic at the same time period. It’s data that would otherwise be forever wasted. Here are a few things I’ve picked up along my experience that I think apply to much more than just programming:

1. Expand yourself, and good things will come later. The calculator was never an overnight success. In fact, it took an entire year for the thing to get any significant traffic. But during that year, I made passive improvements to the site: I switched platforms to Wordpress, improved the semantics of the template documents, came up with several iterations of blog design, and simplified the commenting system to oblivion, just for the sake of improvement itself. Like a tree branch reaching out to its neighbor, growing in all directions will get you to the sky all the same. Sometimes, focusing too hard is the worst thing you can do.
2. It’s little things that count, and by little things, I mean presentation code that far outweighs the program itself. I occasionally get the fan comment about providing the calculator’s source code or the email from some Chinese entrepreneur about integrating the calculator into his Android app. The issue is, you could write a single line of Python that does the exact same calculation with none of the user interface mess. You could write it in TI-Basic or Objective C. The calculator doesn’t take much time to maintain, but most of the time I do spend on it is spent improving the user interface. If you just consider the program by itself, it doesn’t merit a lot of notice and doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s the interface surrounding the program that keep visitors coming back.
3. Ideals sound nice and easy, until you try putting them to use. Programming is highly dehumanizing of clients. It’s hard to think of visitors as human beings when all our protocols only define communication from device to machine. Something idealistic like a Free-speech comment policy is not as easily upheld when you’re dealing with entries in a relational database. With hundreds of unmoderated comments, it’s easy to remove or edit out anything you find disagreeable, but difficult to stick to your integrity and respond responsibly.

It has been several months since I wrote anything on this blog. College got in the way, and when my own final exams were over, the thought of hundreds of pairs of eyes per minute inundating the site really discouraged me from publishing at all. But Happy New Years, and I hope I can continue writing here somehow. I should be getting to sleep now.

A butter croissant sits on the patio table next to a half-pint cup of caffè macchiato, both never unspoilt by neither teeth nor tongue, yet it seems that many a thinker has pondered this familiar scene before. The morning’s brisk rays illuminate grooved textures on the French pastry: layered butter and folded dough, sugar, milk, and an all-around exemplary delight. Adjacent to it, liquified ejecta from the bowels of our dicotyledonous subjugators are an equally tempting t(h)reat, not only for their chemical potency and social connotations, but also for their distinctive bitterness. The cult of misery is nothing new to those who have grown to enjoy herbal tea and such foods as bitter melon. Okakura Kakuzō’s essay on teaism in Japanese culture explores how tea and a related set of other foods and drink are important in maintaining perspective of one’s own existence in the world and finding philosophical balance between callous ignorance and what he calls the springtide of emancipated emotions¹. Moderation between pleasure and restraint is not unique to the Japanese. The principle of qi in taoism and yin-yang in traditional Chinese medicine support very much the same concept. It is clear that human beings find a certain satisfaction in bitterness, a fact that is so easily forgotten in the modern era, where pleasure and satisfaction are so seemingly inseparable.

Plain strongly-brewed coffee is repulsive by itself. Coffee plant seeds, as well as tangentially related cocoa beans, are naturally very bitter and off-putting, but for the accompanying measures of sugar added. Meanwhile, pastries tolerate consumption in arbitrarily wasteful quantities, and while sweetness tempts more than does pungency², the latter is a more vicious cycle. Despite their differences, it is still no more correct to indulge in suffering than it is to in cheap and instant gratification. There is not even such thing as balance between the two, no path between Scylla and Charybdis. The two actually need to be taken together. It is a fool who cannot see wisdom in the pursuit of unhappiness, but a bigger fool who can see nothing else. On the path to wisdom and maturation, the pungency of self-pity and introspective immersion presents a tantalizing explanation to all of life’s complications, but in time, you realize cynicism is never smarter, only safer.

At the end of the day, all that is left of your two tempting snacks is a paper bag and an empty foam cup. The light paper catches the wind like a sailboat’s sail and flutters as it tries to fly headfirst to the atmosphere above, but coffee’s remnants, though basically the same material, anchor it firmly to the ground. Overall, the system is more dynamic and permanent than either item alone would be, and perhaps that is the way it should be.

Who is responsible for poverty? Whose fault is disease? All but the most skeptical of people agree that there is unpleasantness in the world whose persistent endurance is beyond the wicked capacity of any one person, but instead is the result of simple things that we understand but cannot control. Searching for the answers to these questions quickly reduces your humanitarian contemplation to rehashes of the physical properties of matter. At their essence, there is no cause for sickness and death beyond antagonistic configurations of elementary blocks and flaws in our quaternary information storage system¹. Consequently, we have to introduce abstract entities before we can really plunge into these philosophical problems: humans, their affiliations, and their relationships among one another. Whom do we blame for heartbreak? Whose sin is mass deception? And whose is envy? To understand a human being, you need sympathize with them, enough to learn their afflictions, but not excessively, lest you neglect their crimes. In light of classical mechanics’s support of determinism, it is so tempting to relieve an other of all responsibility for their mistakes and believe that wickedness is a naturally incorrigible part of our constitution². If there is no man’s malice behind afflictions, then why cannot the same be said for crimes? Can hostility, depravity, and callousness really be attributed to a violent rearing? A series of stressful weeks? A reciprocation of a cruel world’s scorn?

The answer is incontrovertibly, no. It is unconditionally and unequivocally, no. Whether you consult science or tale, it is indisputable that human beings, to the extent that the constituents of an individual can be aggregated and thought of as a single entity, have the power to change and redefine the future regardless of preexisting conditions³. Additionally, it is truly from those who exercise their free will, or an analogous equivalent thereof, to oppose their afflictions, that we do and should derive our ethical inspiration, for it is easy to act on impulse and do what ostensibly feels right, but difficult to actually identify our own imperfections and act on what really is right.

Recall some of the biggest of your life’s changes, especially those which impacted not only your life, but equally, those of your friends and your community. I’ve learned in the past few weeks that shifting ground reveals rifts through which the tragedy of one’s afflictions shines most viciously. Friends become estranged. Humans err and misunderstand. The susceptible turn to cheap and comforting lies, or else lapse toward depression. We are taught not to judge one another; that is, to forgive each others’ vices and to never lose sight of the afflictions, both those we know of and those which are concealed, that lead us into our crimes, to “remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the same advantages that you’ve had” as Fitzgerald put it. But it is equally important to remember that we are always capable of rejecting the burden of our afflictions and that we should always try harder to live as stronger human beings, to be better to each other and, most importantly, to ourselves. It is all we can do as pathetic flecks of dust in an world that was never made to be fair.

A great number of people publish from positions of power, after experience has granted them a gift of wisdom along with the responsibility of spreading it throughout the world. They then find their task very clear and simple. They command authority over some particular subject in which other seek insight and validation. In short, people write about what they know best. However, the great majority of people are not experts nor leading researchers on anything at all, other than themselves. It falls upon them to identify subjects using which they can write assured of their own competence. Many choose the circuitous solution and become the expert they need to be, but even more will shirk the duty and end up abandoning their honest efforts or redirecting them to wasteful self-entertaining ends. Likewise, I disclaim and despair to know little outside of the electric boxes of which I make a hobby. I make a sick sport of stringing together senseless sentences of snooty words to say what can be said in fewer¹. I like to see the shape of a long and ostensibly intelligent copy run down my white digital pages like the mason raising walls. But it’s too often that I want to write about something too strongly opinionated, pervasively personal, or intangibly technical that it simply will not fit well into the purposes for which I created this blog. Recently, I feel that all of these posts have been like manifestos. They are declarations of intention that begin with observations and finish with tangentially related mandates to live better and live wiser, and although they fulfill my purpose, they fulfill few of yours². Still, I wouldn’t have you think for a second that this blog which is but one of several virtual hosts running on but one of 2^16 ports is the only purpose for which I keep this system running. I have static pages that bring in revenue, a mail exchanger to bring in news, and subdomains for personal sites to boot. From here on out, I will be focusing more on another blog on which the subject, rather than the chronology, of the posts is primary. I’ve defined and redefined my intentions, and now I’m done.

As human beings, we have misconceptions of the nature of randomness. Try it and write down a sequence of random digits. You’ll notice that certain numbers tend to be repeated, or that no two consecutive digits are the same. Maybe your numbers tend to go up and then down and then up again, or that you’ll use all the digits before repeating any. It’s simply our natural tendency to look for patterns where there may not be any. All cell phone numbers appear, to the human mind, to exhibit patterns. Some follow a circular path around the keypad and the digits of others are contained within an unnaturally small subset of the ten possible digits. It is the same reason why we cannot at first understand how a group of only twenty-three people have a 50% probability of containing two with the same birthday¹. Not withstanding, we usually have no problem distinguishing between a human-generated sequence from a truly random one, the same way we can form preconceptions of the natural versus the artificial. So why is it that synthesizing such sequences seems so strenuous? The inability to unbiasedly create randomness isn’t an innate cognitive fault in humans, but a result of the overwhelming complexity of true randomness.

Computer security researchers in the field of cryptography spend a lot of time examining the features of randomness. Programs are based around logic and well-defined instructions, so it is inherently difficult for a computer to create unpredictability. The ability of a program to create unpredictable numbers is very important. Consider a thousand different programs running simultaneously that tend to drift into resonance, so that the most taxing parts of their cycles align to create immense stress to their system. Consider picking a totally random number from a key space of 18 quintillion possible choices as a method of securing secrets. Presently, random numbers are created using either a pseudo-random number generator which recursively applies a well-defined mathematical function to an initial number (called a seed), usually the time stamp, to generate a sequence of ostensibly random but ultimately predictable numbers, or an outside device that detects cosmic radiation or atmospheric noise to transform external randomness into usable forms.

A number generator that is good (unpredictable) enough to be used for sensitive purposes is designated a cryptographically-secure pseudorandom number generator, or csprng for short. Achieving a high ‘quality’ of randomness is a serious topic of constant research and development². By quality, they mean the inability to predict possible (and also impossible) outcomes despite having full knowledge of the algorithm. Every couple of years, a popular hash function is phased out of use because the randomness from which it derives its security is broken or hampered by further research. Therefore, it’s no joking matter to flippantly declare oneself to be “so random”! How irreverent to this research are those people who think their capricious hipster hedonism amounts to true randomness, as if humans could really achieve such a thing.

Okay, actually, I just find it a bit amusing how quickly I’m so random! gets thrown around, and it’s not just something pretentious hipsters came up with. Randomness is indeed difficult to achieve as human beings, but like other difficult things, it can be attained through persistence and hard work. Bruce Lee says “If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level³.” To be unpredictably unpredictable and to constantly change everything about you including your change itself is to do justice to the meaning of random, for randomness is not a characteristic that can be easily doled out to the weak-hearted. If only more people understood the significance of the concept, this moral excellence could be better realized. So I implore you, go be random but be it correctly.

It seems like the next big thing is always trying to combine the knobs and buttons of your life into a single revolutionary new paradigm of luxury. Especially exemplary are the new developments in heads-up display devices¹ and the various misnomers for cloud computing. At a primitive level, we understand the advantages. It’s integrated. All of it is, like a strict building code in a top-dog neighborhood. As human beings, we’re predisposed to patterns because it’s part of our innate behavior. The predictability and uniformity of life comes from the hunter-gatherer era when fewer things to worry about meant an easier life. But, humans, as usual, make bad choices for themselves.

Think about every invention in the world that has stood the test of time. Each does only one thing and it does it well. From the resistors and capacitors of integrated circuits to complex server farms, every level of organization is both specialized and generalized. Lightbulbs and PET bottles have exceedingly specific usages, but their true ingenuity comes not from the object itself, but from the way they are used in conjunction as part of a larger system. On the other hand, things like home entertainment systems are modularized into replaceable interconnecting parts that can be reused in the future². All of the modern world stands on the shoulders of giants before us, and it is only by building off the breakthroughs of our predecessors that we can see farther and farther. So why do modern tech startups insist on starting afresh? No, I’m sorry. That’s unfair. Some of the largest perpetuators of this animalistic ideology are billion-dollar household names who actually do have the resources to push standards into our lives. That’s not too bad. After all, standards, in addition to language and culture, are defined by what we the people make them to be. Then we would all be fine and dandy letting the big guys call the shots if only there weren’t established protocols already in existence.

It’s funny when people are reviewing their risk management and take into account the security strength of the standards they’re using³. In the practical world, the protocols that run everything from our banking system to vulgar forms of amusement are tried and tested. Not only that, they’ve already been introduced to and are supported by platforms and people. It’s curious how we want so badly to change what’s already familiar to us into newfangled all-in-one packages that are good at no one thing in particular. But still, not everything must be so monofunctional and boring. Semantically, cell phones are single-purpose devices. They’re mobile communication, and not for games and diversions. Why would you put games on a Kindle or watch television on a phone? It makes little sense in the presence of consoles and televisions that were created for these purposes. That’s not to say repurposing old equipment for untraditional uses isn’t a commendable hobby for enthusiasts. However, it does seem that society has lost track of this design goal lately.

It’s the end of spring break already. I was on BearFacts yesterday researching about class registration when it occurred to me that they were telling me about picking college courses and planning out a schedule for the first time for courses that will be taught by strangers hundreds of miles away. By that time, everything will have changed and everyone will have moved away. Most of my spring break I spent shut-in cramming physics because of my ridiculously short time frame, so I haven’t really seen anyone for a week now. For brief periods, I could almost pretend that everything and everyone outside of my textbook and notes didn’t exist, as if the big change had already happened. Right then and there, I realized that it’d be no different were I studying three hundred miles north in a smaller room on a smaller desk with no memento of the past aside from the desktop computer I would bring with me. I’ve also started reading this book, Norwegian Wood, and in it there’s this guy who is forgetting all the memories he made from his youth not only because he’s aging, but also because he never expected that he’d ever have to remember the scenery and faces of those particular days, so far in his future. You could disregard him and say that memories forgotten are not worth remembering, but in pursuit of greater happiness, it’s indisputable that reviving better days brings a sort of precious amusement that is so easily lost. Maybe in fifty years or perhaps just ten years, this week of recess won’t make much of an impression like shadows in the mind eroded by many abrasive sunsets. However, that doesn’t mean these days are meaningless or ill-spent ¹. There is necessary contrast between difficult work and childish diversions or bitter valleys and well-deserved highs. This inclines most people to find reasonable that memorable recollections must likewise contrast with uneventful self-improvement², when really there is no necessary relation here.

Some of our most interesting days are also the least noteworthy. When nothing memorable happens, we additionally tend not to write nor speak about it, and in this fashion, memories are soon overshadowed and abandoned. This regrettable loss is especially pervasive today when so many different things demand our attention at once. Keeping a journal and writing letters become chores, whereas they are meant to be cathartic as depositories for fleeting thoughts. On the other side, a greater degree of complexity to our society also enables us to communicate and record with such ridiculous convenience. In Code Geass there’s this girl whose memories are regularly rewritten against her will, so she keeps a day to day picture journal that she carries around like a phone. The advantage to this is that digital devices can be acceptably used in most social contexts ³ so they take very little extra effort and instead repurpose a small amount of time and attention that is prodigiously wasted at social gatherings anyway. It’s like a private twitter. I’ve set up a similar system with MMS on my cell phone and a private blog and email account over the Internet. There are times when writing in a moleskin or typing to a blog is more appropriate, but there certainly is an unfilled niche for a more dedicated device to help humans remember the easily forgettable.

Epiphany highs are those times when you feel awakened and renewed after supposedly having a breakthrough. They are very common as adolescents in the course of character development. You find a clever bit of wisdom—change comes from within—and you think it’ll solve all of your personal problems if only one thing were different. For a few weeks, you feel pumped up and excited to live with a renewed philosophy. You might experience temporary successes thinking this is what I’ve been doing wrong all this time¹ But the effects always wear off in the end. That’s when you start looking for another life-changing realization to kick-off the cycle again. In retrospect, all of these profound sayings will end up sounding trite and absurd. No philosophical outlook can satisfy you forever. Perhaps on another day, you might hear don’t fix it if it ain’t broke and experience the very same thing.

As you go through different epiphanies, you have to look in more places. After you exhaust the Internet, you will read books or watch foreign films and television. You can dive into religion or become a cynic, then a optimist, then a classicist and a romanticist. You will encounter cosmology and be satisfied with the stars, or you’ll observe humans and revel in belittling amusement². It feels like something has finally clicked in your life and you’re ready to move on, only to return to where you started when the effects subside. You easily enter a cycle where a pursuit of philosophical wisdom quickly transforms into a drug-like addiction for mental equanimity. Self-help books. Hipster quotes. Journals and blogs. They are all part of your exploits. You want to declare to the world that you’ve found a new lifestyle, a new living attitude that supersedes those of your past and anybody else’s. It’s a manifesto. You, explaining yourself to the world.

The cycle grows shorter, more convenient and efficient until wisdom bounces off of you like nicotine off a habituated synapse. Soon you realize that you’re only able to live when you’re on these bouts of progress—these epiphany highs. But who are we to judge that a tail-chasing quest in philosophy is an improper way to live? The practical problem lies in the delusion that there is something golden at the end of the hunt that will satisfy our curious minds like no other. In reality, it’s difficult to argue that any one way of thinking appeals to everybody. In the meantime, it appears that it’s simply best to take your time, not to rush.

I like to set aside time at least once a week to work on something creative, computer stuff excluded. It’s my arts and crafts time. I can pick something from pinterest to mimic or start another journal or make cards for certain holidays. It’s not about creating something that I can show off or learning a skill. Instead, the time is a sort of mental reset, kind of like meditation or napping. See, when you first learn a skill, it takes a lot of conscious effort. You try to dissect the technique and compartmentalize each of the motions until you master each one separately. This is a low degree of competency: you can do it, but it’s mentally taxing. After a while, the process becomes repetitive and second-hand, and you start losing the conscious component. The sensory perception information starts to bypass conscious thought completely. When we learn to hit a tennis ball or drive a car, we no longer have to think about the specific motions involved. Our subconscious can directly process the copious amounts of information necessary to maintain coordinated motor output. This in particular is the effect I look for.

Direct processing is a curious thing. Idle tasks like sewing and cutting paper easily take up the majority of a person’s motor capabilities, but nearly none of the conscious ones. It leaves you free to ponder things that would otherwise be difficult to focus on, especially with the many distractions of the modern world. It’s no use to sit down for ten minutes and try to reproduce this effect by simply mimicking someone else’s idle activity. No. Your mind has to be fully convinced that there exists nothing for it to consciously process, and only then does direct processing take effect. When we get bored, it’s not because we have nothing to do, but rather, we have nothing we can do given the current circumstances. When the best use of your time is so drastically limited by your location, your situation, whatever it may be, you feel apathetic and bored. Similarly, direct processing is most effective during times when you truly believe you have for lack of better words, nothing better to do. This could be at two in the morning, when the next best thing to do is, well, sleep¹. This could be at the airport, waiting for a boarding call. This could be Monday afternoon in calculus class. For me, it’s Friday night, mostly, when I am at home.

The most recent thing I’ve made is a thread-bound notebook using copy paper and the scrapbook paper leftover from my February 14th day cards. Sewing itself is a peculiar process, though I was not really sewing but driving a needle through thirteen layers of unyielding paper. At first, I used simple lateral force to shove the pointy end through, piercing a hole until it reached all the way to the last sheet. It was precise, but made my fingers sore. Then, I thought of what I knew about impulse and shear stress and the mechanical advantage of nails². The thing about hammering a needle is, one well-placed strike with perfectly-aligned orthogonal force and a follow-through to maximize impulse is much more effective than a series of misdirected hits or one forceful lopsided slap. Threading a needle and getting the stitches to line up is very frustrating. It’s natural to use more force and become angered from the result, but this only worsens the situation. It’s a playful mental game. In order to thread properly, you need mental equanimity³. Maintaining peace of mind also contributes to the effects of direct processing. This trend can be clearly tracked as my stitches are more and more aligned near the bottom of the notebook’s binding.

Direct processing does not necessarily require quiet, only quietude. For example, social interactions in most people often (and necessarily) dissents to direct processing, especially when a large number of factors (people) are involved. The complexity of such situations quickly becomes overwhelming for conscious thought, and so is better left to unconscious direct processing of stimuli. Emergent properties in your speech (one in particular: wit) are the result of direct processing, while more profound properties (compassion, evaluation, judgement) are indicative of higher-level conscious processing. At a basic level, anybody who interacts with human beings understands this. It’s unacceptable to apply thought to every social scenario, but insightful to do so for some.

This kind of wisdom certainly can be helpful. You can consciously trigger your brain to switch to direct processing. Your conscious thought will yield to direct processing if you simply remind it of the disadvantages of judging everything, and so, you can avoid delayed responses or completely absent ones. When someone says they are feeling off or out of it, they really mean that they’ve lost track of their direct processing. It’s like how you can’t sleep when you keep thinking about sleeping. This is not always effective, but a quick fix for such uncomfortable situations is to descend momentarily into deep analytical thought, then jump back to the surface, continuing the shallow cycle of stimulus-response. If ever you find that this mechanism stops working for you, it’s a sign that you haven’t been thinking enough.

One of our most bizarre social stigmas is against the trumpeting of good deeds. We are taught from birth that real charity shouldn’t bring attention to itself, that selflessness is somehow better when it passes undiscovered to all but oneself. But in a society of open-minded individuals, this paradigm may honestly be one thing holding back progress. This ideal which is taught across cultures and religions¹ did apply at one time in the past when the world was not as connected as it is now.

The advent of globalization has done wonders to the standards of the First World, primarily that an individual need no longer live walled in by the limitations of social and governmental precedents. The communities we build online transcend these historical boundaries and cultivate a generation of people in which Indians and Pakistanis can laugh and play together. The world of the past needed such ideas as the discreet execution of philanthropy because an isolated and unconnected part of the world would soon succumb to grandiloquent exhibitions of self-righteousness. Some of the greatest architectural and political wonders of the ancient world were direct results of these sanctimonious displays. It’s very clear why such a stigma had existed universally². However, things have since changed.

The problem with retaining this old tradition is simply that the world is now different. On one hand, isolated communities are no longer the norm in the developed nations of the world, but more importantly, the luxuries of globalization have changed the fundamental nature of human societies. Many of our life philosophies no longer come from our ancestors or books, but from the influences of our peers. Our generation of transcendence is proof of this. The world is connecting. If we are to be influenced by our peers, it makes sense that models of character should not be hampered by centuries-old traditions of hiding charity. Without the violent risk of small communities falling into ignorance and dogma, our thinking now needs to change. Whether we choose to announce good deeds or cover them in secrecy is not important. This very question focuses excessively on appearance and not enough on the deed itself. In reality, we should neither strive to publicize nor conceal selflessness. The nature of our choices should be discussed and debated to the fullest extent, indeed, with respect to the idea that good people influence good people. If the whole world were to clean up trash and leave conveniences in total privacy, there would be no more precedents of goodness left. Showing your positive intentions should not be shameful, for that only detracts from what can be accomplished by its effects.

Human beings are so bizarre. It took many years before I could grasp adequately the combinations of relations that can exist among numbers of sentiment-ridden friends. In my head, it’s all graph theory: vertices, formations in a ‘Z’, bridges and nodes with adjacency matrices and relational costs manifested in humans as motivation and want. I get the feeling that typical people come to the conclusions I have by experience alone, meaning trial and error in frequency, or perhaps it’s by upbringing. Thinking it out mathematically does take me a while longer, but I need more evidence than just the empirical. I’m convinced that the best of us enjoy living for amusement. The things that we as a species can plausibly endeavor to do, above any contempt, they are life’s profoundly cruel jokes on whatever existence we hope to find important. That is why, when I’m displaced into such a strange viewpoint, such a foreign enumeration of the same exact people I thought I did know, my graphs and charts need a long contemplation to readjust. It’s akin to a Square, seeing in 3-space Spaceland for the first time¹.

Well, the great tragedy is no single human being can be knowledgeable in everything there is to know, but we try to learn from the best. Kurt Vonnegut wrote some of the most interesting books I’ve read, and I say they’re interesting because of the point of view he usually takes. As a preemptive measure against provincial thinking, he writes about human beings from the viewpoint of an extraterrestrial, or perhaps a solitary hermit, who maybe has a textbook education of interhuman relationships², if that. Things that seem ordinary and customary down here on the planet’s surface are described with derision and justified with invalid, but oft employed lines of reasoning. The problem with this kind of writing is that we are not outside observers and should not act like them.

As a race, humans are supposed to learn, right? Sometimes, fundamental questions like these need to be accepted as axioms or else nonsensical questions about existence preclude any meaningful thought. So if we’re supposed to learn, then the purpose of learning must be its influence on the way we think and act. In a society of such cultivated individuals who suppress such carnal and animalistic forces for the sake of establishment and harmony, what do the sources of learning tell us in terms of how to behave? Again, I’m convinced that the best of us enjoy living simply for amusement. The less inhibition you harbor the more amusing the great tragedy seems. But with the things that I saw yesterday, I’m not so sure anymore. I don’t think I’ll be ready to find any more answers³ to existence until I’ve reconciled these observations into theory.

I think we’re a pretty responsible group. You and I, I mean. The audacity to dive into such a lengthy body of text, is it habitual or a shot at betterment? Perhaps we’re into displeasure. Things like drinking tea, and reading novels or persisting through thirty minutes of better nate than lever, they require a degree of enlightened perspective or philosophy that generally coincides with responsibility. So I say, we are a pretty responsible group. How much effort does it take? I’d say a whole damn lot. Effort, if the universe can be said to exert such a thing, in its relentless irony poking into our lives¹. Responsibility is a rather abstracted term when you examine it. When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to haul ass, such presumptuous words as responsibility come into use. In all honesty, it is indistinguishable from the effects of a clear thinking mind, in which group costs and benefits are factored into decisions. Nobody can be responsible, for the sake of responsibility. That’s one characteristic ideal which primary education and its golden arthropod target so savagely, so needlessly. The true yellow sheen comes from the oh-so-hotly debated axiom that human-to-human connections are priority in rational minds. Yes, for the sake of argument, this assertion is the primary one that must be accepted. But what are the efforts, the circumstances within which such a “responsible” group can exist? What may be a ubiquitous, absurdly vapid detail of all leadership applications is really a fairly lofty overhang on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. To a certain degree, everyone is aware of the uniquely indulgent position he holds in context of all existence². The general conclusion is that, though contextual wisdom may be spiritually cathartic or emotionally practical, such thinking and inquiry ultimately degenerates into meaningless, unanswerable questions of existence and purpose. Therefore, the emancipated fool of newly-attained misinformed insight isn’t a very common nor applauded occurrence. In reality, it takes very little to call oneself responsible, and less to meet the standard.