time freezes at airports. it's funny, because it is exactly because everying is timed to the minute that time is frozen there. flights come in and go out all the time. and the florescent lighting doesn't give you a clue whether the sun was up outside. people of all races walk around you, some sitting around, as if waiting for eternity to begin, sometimes rushing like fish shooting themsleves at a floating bait. it is like the gears in a clockwork, that, by precisely being the mechanism on which time is built, alienates itself from the substance of time. the gears rotate, and maybe some arms move, but inside the clock, twelve midnight is just as well as any second that gives way to the next eternity. Four flights in five days, and my time stil hasn't seem to have thawed.

mascular memory

amazing. i'm at the airport and tried logging into the public teminals with my password... and suddenly i couldn't log in... panicked and wondered what happened overnight because i had just logged in the night before... sat down with my notebook plugged into the free ports and tried and tried... until i tried logging into an account i log in everyday and my fingers just did it...

passwords are mascular conditioning, i tell you... your fingers remember them better than you do... give them a chance!

「ほたるの墓」を見てきた。よく頑張ってきたな、日本人は。戦争の時の辛さが映画中でしみじみに描かれ、戦争の世界の幻のような、現実のような生と死。そして、大自然がその苦しんでいる人たちを支えてあげていること。家族というもの。愛する人との別れ。苦しんでいる子供の辛抱。生活の選び方。心の中に隠すなくなった人に対しての思い出。人生の希望。

いっぱいいっぱい描いてくれたね、宮崎せんせい。ありがとう。

it's been raining the whole day today, and it's still raining. love rains, and today it rained the kind of rain i love. i love rains because, unless we live underground, it is one thing that remains that still connects the city back to nature. i love rains, because when it rains, the whole land is at rest.

today's rain was particularly restful. big fat soft raindrops breaking on drooping leaves and the hungry earth. even the wind was still. and even my eyes wanted to close, calling me to lie down and slow myself down to the rhythm of the earth and join it in its rest.

maybe it's just the too many agendas and too many appointments that we have that we forget how we ought have lay down and let life take its pace. surely, a rain this pretty coudln't have been an inconvenience?

internationalisation vs evolution

i would suppose that the creation (c) of information has at least two factors: the way we think (f), and the information around us we are exposed to (i). That means something like this:

f:i -> c

this means that to maximise c, we will need to maixmise both the range of i and the size of the function class of f. this has two implications:

(1) information needs to be shared as widely as possible
(2) the way we think need to be as varied as possible

which IMHO are somewhat contrary to each other, in the sense that, to achieve (1), we need to branch out and internationalise our horizons; but globalisation inevitably brings in some degree of homogenisation, which does not agree with (2). It is then the challenge for every knowledge economy to absorb the world's wealth of information, and somehow, choose not to conform. Only then can it become and remain a creator of information instead of being a receipient.

some countries have done well in this, others haven't. Those that do well, do a lot for themselves - not just because information sells, but i think this has a lot more to do with identity. or at least attitude - because they have seen the great wealth of information out there, yet for some reason, chosen not to give up their own set of thinking frameworks. only then would their thinking be given a chance, to evolve.

i have come to believe quite a bit in human evolution. not the darwinian one, but rather evolution as opposed to revolution. i think people change in two ways - they either change so that they can make their surroundings suit them, or they change so that they will suit their surroundings. while changing one's surrounding sounds heroic and all, one must remain powerful enough to drive all this change, and to continue driving it; on the other hand, changing oneself to suit his surroundings requires that the practioner remain flexible enough to continue adapting. the advantage here, though, is that even when you're up against someone who is adapting in a direction different than you, you are still used to adapting to your surroundings - but one who must drive change, must drive others out of their change as well. if you're up against the world, that could be quite a big drive you will need.

the difficult thing about human evolution, though, is in adapting constructively. that means, every change should add to, and not remove, adaptability. and this, as you can imagine, can be quite a complex problem with no standard answer. but this is what makes it worth its while - when everyone evolves independantly, everyone would represent an isolated ecosystem of information. and this is what i mean by maixmising (f), the way we think.

we need to make our surroundings a self-sufficient ecosystem of information. if you americanise too much, you would lose some of your thought-identity. you would become american. but surely, there's always more than one way to do things. live, and let live.

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