and this is what i had for lunch today

(2 comments)
2007.03.02
There's this theme that's been recurring in much of my recent reading, especially Oliver Sack's "An Anthropologist on Mars", how there are some non-subjective elements to life out there, universally human factors, like flow... in the sense that some people who seem to have profound deficiencies in, say, completing tasks, in being functional in the world, in putting one subtask properly after another, can sometimes get by if they put it to music, or if they are working with some other art form that has a certain internal consistency or logic... a flow.

Maybe it's a stretch, but I was reminded of that with how I was arranging my keys as of late. For a long while, I've been able to limit the keys in my pocket to a clicker for my car, a large-ish car key, and a smaller house key. My new job gave me a key to the restroom, and I really had to think about what kind of arrangement of the three keys was most intuitive to me , so I wouldn't have to think about it. The house and restroom are both unlocked with the teeth face up, so that was the first step of the arrangement. The clicker goes in my palm. Putting each small key on either side of the big key was too symmetrical. Then I thought the most intuitive arrangement was to put the house key next to the car key, since the house and the car are in closer proximity to each other than the job is to either.

But that was wrong... the best arrangement is with the restroom on the "inside" of the other two keys, since I'm already inside (a hallway) when I go to use it, and I'm standing outside when I use the housekey. That seems to be the logic my subconscious mind is using, and life has better flow when I respect that.

I'm aware that by itself "this is how I put the keys on my keyring" sounds like the worst kind of "who else in the world cares?" blogging, but that's just because I'm not doing a good enough job of going into the sense of "flow" that it represents for me, and the implications of that.


Images of the Moment
--Leave it to the Germans to do photoresearch into that age old question, What's the last thing to go through a bug's mind when it hits your windshield?



Dumb Question of the Moment
"...You ok?"
"No--"
Jonathan King and Michael Holmes, after Holmes fell about 12,000 feet when his parachutes didn't open.
The video shows Holmes checking his altimer, saying "bye", and then his perspective under from under his failed chute... then you see the same scene from King's perspective. It wasn't QUITE freefall, but man...