Day: January 6, 2008

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“Thinking Outside the Box” | A Yuletide Apocalypse

From my other blog; I thought it worthy of a repost here 🙂

The following paragraph (from this article) distills in a less ADD way what I was trying to say…
Although ADHD is still classified a disorder because of the challenges individual’s face with it, I’m more convinced everyday that it is a way of thinking and processing the world that is so beneficial to humanity, we must turn our attention to it. In many ways, our attention has been focused only on the disorder side of the condition, at the expense of the strengths, and science is just beginning to discover what those strengths might be. There is a popular book out right now, The Black Swan, about how all major changes come from ‘outliers’ in the world of ideas, the strange and misunderstood ideas that don’t fit into conceptual frameworks of the day but prove to shift humanity to new heights.

[From ”Thinking Outside the Box“, Creativity, Innovation and ADHD et al. | A Yuletide Apocalypse]

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On Poop

There are some things people just don’t like to talk about.

No matter how close a friend or significant other, poop perpetually exists as taboo, reserved for only medical emergencies (or kinky sex? Let’s not go there). If it exists at all.

When a group travels beyond the realm of bacterial familiarity, into a land where gastrointestinal integrity is no longer taken for granted, a special bond is formed.

Anyone who has traveled to a distant land can attest to the magic that is travelers talking about their GI lives. At home, people talk about work lives, sex lives; but in Mongolia, we had whole soap-operas worth of material and drama pertaining to nothing more than diarrhea and its many relatives.

A: Hey Kevin, how was your day?
K: Good, but I haven’t shat in 3 days! I’m gonna go try now…
A: Damn! Well, good luck! Give ’em hell!

[10 minutes later]

A: Well?
K: Great success!!
A: Hallelujah!

Such a situation was quite plausible, if not normal. This extreme take on a traditionally sensitive subject (flexibility borne of necessity and increasing familiarity with said subject’s less desirable territories) exposes the opposite extreme in which we are perpetually trapped back in the 1st world. Sure, once a healthy rhythm is established, and things stop being interesting, it fades from view…

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The Arrival of Winter

10/9/07, 9:24 pm:

UB is a different city now — the cold has arrived; there is snow by the sides of the street and blanketing the flanking mountains. the air is crisp, yet clean; not yet soiled by the sulfurous belching of the thousands of ger district stoves. We wear our wool hats, careful not to catch the wind — the one piece of Mongolian folklore that none of us dare scoff at, lest we be stricken with yet one more bout of Montezuma’s Revenge. Yet the Mongols carry on as usual. The vendors on the streets are now gloved, but the public seems dressed for autumn.

As winter begins to make it clear that no, she won’t be going anywhere anytime soon, the winter clothes begin to appear. Suddenly I am not the only one on the bus to be grasping the plastic hanging handles with gloved hands. My breath grows thicker by the day, and I begin to see and feel the first signs of smog, clouds hovering outside our front door, waiting to be drawn in. After a few weeks I have a smoker’s cough, nothing too violent; just a persistent aggravation. Even the night sky becomes clouded, and the familiar stars fade from above. And then a warm smile, Oh, but this is just the beginning! Winter doesn’t start until January, they tell me.

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On Water

thoughts
They can slowly grow from humble beginnings, like a forest of frozen dew crystals. Or catch experiences in mid-air, like the glistening stalks of grass along a frozen lakeshore — caught in the surf’s nightly descent into solidness. Or they can be free to meander about, a skin-tingling mist, pulling in passing rays and exposing their true colors.

And in a moment of beautiful creative mania, they come pouring out in a deluge as though from a ruptured vessel.

And yet, they are not so essential, as those life-giving molecules of neutral-clear tastingness.