I have been told I should have a hobby. It’s not the first time I’ve received such advice. I have taken it, too. For a few years, I enjoyed working with clay, making bowls and plates and masks. If someone were to provide me with a fully-equipped private studio, I might return to it, but ventilation would have to be exceptional, considering the fragility of my lungs. Not long ago, I tried stringing beads. I enjoyed it and will do it again, but not often enough to make it a hobby. I would like to learn how to create stained glass art. As with clay, if someone were to provide me with a fully-equipped private studio and a personal tutor, I might give that a whirl. Same thing goes for wood-turning. I’ve tried my hand at painting (both acrylics and oils); enjoyable while I’m creating, disappointing when I see the hideous product that results…nothing like I envision. Finally, I recognize this: I enjoy viewing and otherwise experiencing art, but I do not possess artistic skills and talents. Card games, chess, and other board games do not interest me. Writing might be my hobby, I suppose, but I seem to have lost any substantive creativity I might once have had; that loss has taken much of the enjoyment out of it. A recent suggestion: learn a new language—I have neither sufficient interest nor adequate capabilities to succeed, I am afraid. Hunting: no. Fishing: once, but probably not again. Cooking was once a very attractive pastime, but I have lost most of my interest in that. Literally thousands of options are available to me, but I simply have not found the right one at the right time. I will keep looking.
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Every breath we take, every step we make, can be filled with peace, joy and serenity.
~ Thich Nhat Hanh ~
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In my younger years, someone in my personal sphere—I cannot recall with certainty who—referred to badly-behaving children as noxious weeds. Obviously, the phrase was not a term of endearment. Neither was it, in the context of my youth, as negative as it might initially seem. I remember it as a matter-of-fact expression of annoyance applied to a child going through a period of acting out. The term was not meant to identify the child as “pre-criminal,” maturing as fast as a weed grows; usually, just a temporary irritant. At least that is my perspective today. All children go through a noxious weed stage. And some stay there.
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At the intersection of one’s religiosity, political beliefs, and moral compass is something that may once have been innocuous, but is no more: one’s diet. Diet is no longer simply a personal choice. It is a social tool used to express certain elements of one’s personality and personal beliefs. And it is a bludgeon, a weapon to attack others whose perspectives differ from one’s own. Increasingly, diet is associated with one’s foundational political viewpoints. Vegetarians and vegans lean left; omnivores are more likely than the V-People to lean right, for example. Dietary choices are linked to one’s (and others’) morality, depending on point of view. Meat-eaters sometimes are chastised as morally bankrupt for their complicity in the immoral treatment of animals. It is impossible to be sure that grass-fed beef and free-range chickens emerged as a reaction to that charge; but it might be so. Religious beliefs variously prohibit eating cows, any meat (period), fish on certain days…there must be dozens and dozens of other religiously-dictated dietary rules and guidelines.
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My theory, which I call Swinburn’s Solid Flower Rule, is this:
When gases reach an exceptionally high temperature (142 nonillion kelvins, 10^32K), known a the Planck Temperature, gases transform into an entirely different substance, which, for lack of a better term, we call ExKaZEEdro. ExKaZEEdro is no longer a gas but, instead, a hard, dense, solid membrane that flows like liquid water.
